The Travolta/Cage Project #54 Primary Colors (1998)

As we have learned over the course of this project John Travolta is not a virtuoso who disappears into roles. He’s not a chameleon or a master of accents or dialects. He’s not Meryl Streep, nor is he Peter Sellers. 

Travolta can be a brilliant actor in the right role and the right movie, as his multiple Academy Award nominations  attest, but more than anything the Saturday Night Fever icon is a goddamn movie star. 

That’s what makes casting the Pulp Fiction star as Bill Clinton surrogate Jack Stanton in Primary Colors, Mike Nichols’ 1998 adaptation of the juicy zeitgeist-capturing roman a clef Newsweek columnist Joe Klein published as Anonymous so unexpectedly brilliant. In his radiant, 1990s prime Bill Clinton had the overpowering charisma and dazzling magnetism of a bona fide movie star. 

When he exploded onto the national scene as a long shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992 Clinton was handsome. He was charming. He had a dazzling, conspiratorial smile and a hypnotic, conspiratorial drawl.

Yes, before he was elected president and during his presidency Bill Clinton exuded a mega-watt star-power and effortless warmth that made it easy to believing in him and his fundamental decency and goodness despite ample evidence that he’s an amoral sociopath and possible sex criminal who believes in nothing beyond the necessity of attaining and maintaining power. 

There’s a little Bill Clinton in all of us. That’s what makes him so seductive. But there is a whole lot of Bill Clinton in John Travolta. Primary Colors puts some grey in Travolta’s hair. It similarly gives Travolta’s East Coast rasp a down south drawl and the Face/Off star a dad bod and suddenly he is the very image of the controversial former president. 

But it goes beyond the voice and the look. In one of his finest, most challenging and nuanced performances, Travolta captures Clinton’s ineffable essence: his warmth, his humor and his affability as well as his ability to connect with voters in a way that made them feel like they were special and important to him, that they mattered to him in a very real and sincere way. 

Primary Colors features one of the best instances of product placement this side of Reese’s Pieces in E.T. and Coca-Cola in Mac & Me.

Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who was worked extensively with Fassbinder and Scorsese, shoots the Krispy Kreme where Jack Stanton ducks out to grab a delicious donut is lit from within like it was a goddamned Thomas Kinkade painting or something. 

In this heavenly sequence, Krispy Kreme is not just a place for a tired man on the road to grab a nosh; it’s a haven, a paradise, the Garden of Eden with bear claws, glazed donuts and Bavarian creme-filled donuts. 

The most gorgeously filmed Krispy Kreme in the history of cinema is a makeshift forum for the Arkansas governor with plans on the White House to work his populist magic on the guy behind the counter, who feels seen and heard for possibly the first time in his life while talking to a future president.

That’s the magic of Jack Stanton and Bill Clinton: the ability to connect with the mythical American common man psychologically and spiritually as well as politically. 

Travolta gives his thinly fictionalized take on Bill Clinton the devil’s own charm. Alas, he seems to have other qualities in common with the devil as well. 

Elaine May’s Oscar-nominated screenplay captures the infinite complexities of the Clintons, individually and collectively. May’s wry, knowing screenplay does justice to their extraordinary personal appeal while also conveying in deeply human terms everything that makes them monstrous as well.  

Jack Stanton is the unmistakable focus of Primary Colors. He is the sun around whom everyone orbits but he’s intriguingly not the protagonist. 

Instead we see the world of Jack Stanton and his ambitious, pragmatic and dry-witted wife Susan (Emma Thompson) through the eyes of Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), the grandson of a legendary Civil Rights activist and a hungry young political operative chosen by the Arkansas governor to help run his long shot presidential campaign. 

Like seemingly everyone who meets him, Henry is seduced by Jack’s ability to meet everyone he encounters seem like the all-important center of the universe. Henry sees the good in Jack so he is willing to overlook his penchant for uttering flattering falsehoods and indiscriminate womanizing. 

Primary Colors charts Henry’s gradual disillusionment as he comes to discover that Jack is not the man he desperately needs him to be. From the vantage point of 2021 there’s something quaint about the idea that a political operative would have any idealism to lose. 

I assume that anyone who goes into politics on any level now does so with the explicit understanding that politics are a dirty, corrupt game that taints and destroys everything it comes into contact with but Primary Colors shares Henry’s poignant, deeply human combination of idealism about the possibilities and promise of American democracy and cynicism about the compromises and ugliness of a dirty, rigged game. 

Henry is joined on the campaign by seasoned veterans like Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), a cagy Cajun whose idea of appropriate office banter involves gesturing to his bathing suit area and asking a pretty co-worker “Wanna walk the snake?” 

Primary Colors at least seems cognizant that that this is, at the very least, deeply unprofessional behavior. But it also depicts it as the kind of randy misbehavior that is commonplace in the hard-charging, take-no-prisoner world of presidential politics and almost invariably forgiven and forgotten, and sooner rather than later. 

Thornton channels James Carville so perfectly that after the film’s release Carville was essentially reduced to doing an imitation of Thornton’s imitation of him. Then at a certain point Thornton just kind of disappears to give room for the overpowering force of Kathy Bates’ volcanic, Oscar-nominated performance as pistol-packing, hard-drinking, profane force of nature Libby Holden.

Libby is a brilliant longtime friend of the Stantons who shares Henry’s poignant conviction that the people that they work for should be, on a fundamental level, honest and honorable. Not coincidentally Libby has also spent a lot of time shuffling in and out of psychiatric institutions. Expecting politicians to be good people is a surefire way to drive yourself mad. 

When Jack’s primary competition for the Democratic nomination drops out after a heart attack and is replaced by Governor Fred Picker (Larry Hagman), a distinguished, much revered politician who mysteriously disappeared from the political sphere two decades earlier, it falls upon Libby and Henry to dig up dirt on their opponent and then decide what to do with that information. 

Though primarily known as a television actor, Hagman is perfectly cast as a towering giant of a man whose sad eyes convey an almost bottomless sense of sadness and grief. He is a man of constant sorrow whose eyes convey a world of hurt and disappointment. 

The newcomer to the race turns out to have a whole lot of skeletons rattling around in his closet. This leaves the Stantons with the character-defining dilemma of what to do with this reputation-destroying dirt on a good man who loves his country and is fallible in the way we are all fallible. 

Primary Colors is nearly two and a half hours long. It earns its length through its understanding that politics, particularly on a national scale, is all about stories and sometimes it takes some time to tell a story right, the way it should be told.

Politics is about the stories that we tell ourselves, as well as the stories that we tell each other about who we are and how we see the world. Politics is also about the stories that politicians tell to describe how the world works and how they intend to improve upon that systems. And finally politics is about the stories Americans tell politicians in a desperate bid to get them to care, to take on their troubles as their own. 

It’s been a quarter century since the release of the 1996 novel that inspired Primary Colors. The world has changed dramatically in the interim. The Clintons have changed dramatically as well. The genius of Primary Colors is that it comments just as powerfully on the Clintons of 2021 as it did the Clintons of 1996. 

Individually and collectively we’re still trying to figure the Clintons out. Are they heroes or villains, true believers or cynical opportunists? Do they believe in anything beyond their own naked, unstoppable ambition? Do they truly love each other or is their relationship built upon pragmatism and mutual self-interest rather than passion? 

To its credit, Primary Colors does not offer any easy answers to those questions. Nichols’ thoughtful and sensitive comedy-drama understands the necessity in asking them all the same, precisely because the legacy of the Clintons is so complicated and important that we’ll probably never figure it out completely. 

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