Word: stantons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is what presidential candidate Jack Stanton tells his protege Henry Burton at the end of Primary Colors, a new film adapted from the best-selling novel by journalist Joe Klein; and it's the message we're left with after what amounts to an entertaining embellishment of the 1992 Clinton campaign...
...Burton, Stanton's campaign director (the George Stephanopolous character), learns this lesson the hard way but does finally accept it in all of its cynicism; and the idea is that we should, too. In fact, the message at the end of "Primary Colors" seems to be intended as a universal principle: in order to do good, you also have to be a whore or a hypocrite...
...although one that it is considerably harder to accept--at least for the young, inexperienced and idealistic--and one that she therefore spends less time developing. The real crux of Steinem's argument and the only persuasive aspect of it is simply an echo of the message of Jack Stanton: you've got to be a whore in order to change the world...
...worth of tickets for The Birdcage because every one of them supported gay family values; they went because they thought they'd have a good time. And as Nichols notes, Primary Colors is, in part, about having a good time--the vertiginous good time Henry has trying to get Stanton elected, as if he and Daisy were Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on the big show in their backyard...
Well, what can you do but cry when you've devoted yourself to a candidate like Primary Colors' Jack Stanton--charming, idealistic in some ways, but more than a little slippery? That's the kind of presidential timber we've been getting in the movies lately. Men apt to cut a few moral corners, and then a few more, until all the right angles are as smooth as they are. Men with the scruples of the off-screen President in Wag the Dog, who is caught in a scandal with an underage girl. Or of President Gene Hackman in Absolute...