Word: kleine
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...windows and importuning drivers for last-minute votes like a squeegee guy cadging a dollar. To hell with the odds; this man won't give up. He will keep asking, charming, wheedling, until people finally collapse under his will to be loved. As a character says in the Joe Klein novel on which the film is based, "The heart is a lonely hustler." But hustling--hey, that's politics. That's entertainment...
...charisma. As the actor spreads his seductiveness on a movie screen like jelly on toast, so does Clinton work a room or a country, avidly selling his policies and himself, in love with being loved--and with his need to be loved. No wonder that when Travolta met Klein, he said, "I've been waiting my whole life to play this role...
...answers one thing: Nichols and his once and current partner, screenwriter Elaine May, can make a funny, knowing, ultimately judicious film from the deliciously satyric satire that Klein, a former Newsweek columnist who now works for the New Yorker, published under the pseudonym Anonymous. If you mix the primary colors red, yellow and blue, the result is black. But this is no black comedy. It is a wistful story, about honor (Nichols says) and (we say) about the joy and pain of an idealist's love. Cagily, it asks big, brutal questions. What will we do for someone we love...
...story, not Stanton's, so much so that the film could be called Regarding Henry (a 1991 Nichols movie that Klein particularly admires). Henry--a young black man so properly educated, so fully integrated into the political elite that another black pegs him as "the white man's Burton"--is the soul up for grabs in Primary Colors. He joins the Stanton campaign because he thinks, "This guy could be the real thing." Delicately played by British stage star Adrian Lester (As You Like It, Company), Henry is a can-do Candide, a fixer who keeps hoping Stanton...
...characters in my book took on lives of their own," says Klein. "They were who they were." Still, insiders had fun guessing who in the Clinton caravan matched the characters Klein created. Henry's is the most elusive: a sort of mythical grandson of Martin Luther King Jr. crossed with former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. Nearly everyone else is an acute comic exaggeration of a familiar friend or foe of Bill...