Through the lens of modern politics, former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart is a fairly sympathetic figure. A self-starter and promising visionary, Hart’s political career was derailed after the media reported that Hart had a dalliance with a woman who was not his wife during his presidential campaign, deviating far from journalistic standards of the era.
Yet, The Front Runner can’t sell the media as the bad guys in their retelling of Hart’s fall from grace. It’s almost extraordinary that a cast led by Hollywood giants Hugh Jackman and Vera Farmiga took on such a half-baked script, one which fails to explain any of Hart’s motivations or to make a reasoned ruling on his guilt or innocence.
The few moments in this film meant to humanize Hart induce more eye-rolls than sympathy. The film wants us to credit Hart for his ingenuity in policy and personal empathy, but we’re told more than we’re shown that Hart is a nice guy and a genius.
On a plane with Hart’s campaign and press pool, Hart calms down a Washington Post reporter, Mamoudou Athie as A.J. Parker, during a bout of turbulence. It’s an OK moment but overacted on Jackman’s part, much like another scene where Hart briefly addresses his daughter’s sexuality. It’s not that these moments detract from the story, but they certainly don’t add up to enough sympathy on their own to result in the audience rooting Hart on.
The film plausibly portrays the affair between Hart and Donna Rice, played by Sara Paxton, but it falters in deciding whether it’s problematic. The excellent Vera Farmiga does what she can with the underdeveloped character of Hart’s wife, Lee, but the film can’t decide: Was theirs a quietly open marriage? Is Hart just engaging in widely accepted practices? Or is Hart just a bad guy?
We’re supposed to accept that Hart is some legendary statesman, but he’s hardly portrayed with having presidential temperament. As his campaign attempts to deal with the fallout of the alleged affair — at this point, Hart and Rice have denied the affair, and the evidence, while damaging, wasn’t categorically damning — Hart can’t help but have mini meltdowns and refuse to work with his inner circle. He’s too indecisive to go out and lambaste the media while fessing up nor will he just lie about it. It’s a crisis of decision-making that ultimately proves Hart’s demise.
And we’re simply supposed to accept that this is because he’s an intensely private person. But again, this aspect of his personality is insinuated yet never demonstrated outside of the extraordinary circumstances of the scandal.
The moral centers of The Front Runner are secondary characters. To an extent, one is Molly Ephraim, as campaign staffer Irene Kelly, who grapples with the campaign’s willingness to leak Rice’s name and throw her under the bus. But more so, the only character who undergoes any real growth is Parker, one of the film’s few fictionalized characters. Parker initially doesn’t want to engage with rumors of licentiousness but ultimately pursues the story to completion. The resolution is that there isn’t really any. The veiled conclusion of the film laments that political journalism engages in tabloid style coverage, but Hart’s portrayal is never sympathetic enough to make that kind of journalism seem like a really bad thing.
The raw story was a gold mine, the cast superb, and the cinematography even more so. But ultimately, The Front Runner falls flat. Much like Hart’s political career itself, The Front Runner never really decides what it wants to say.
