![]() ![]() A debate among Democratic candidates looks like current events, yet there's iconoclast Bill Bonds, the long-gone Howard Beale of Detroit news anchors moderating the debate. George Stephanopoulos appears on ABC's This Week, only he's a guest (and not yet its host) doing damage control on behalf of his boss. Looking at it now, The War Room is a little surreal. It's a look inside one presidential campaign, nothing more or less. Those who would claim movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 don't qualify as documentaries because they're not "objective" (an absurd statement: all documentaries are subjective), might prefer this over the bulk of last year's Op-Ed pieces. The film shows the campaign's cleverness but also its occasional foolishness (e.g., a long-winded debate about media-savvy "home-made" signs at the Democratic Convention) and naked spin ("Just keep on repeating that Bush was on the defensive all night!" Stephanopoulos instructs his team after one of the Clinton-Bush debates). Indeed, those unfamiliar with the players may find the film confusing at times, such as Carville's opposites attact romance with Bush strategist Mary Matalin, which goes unexplained in the picture. There's no explaination of what's going on during a particular scene, and the filmmakers are resolutely invisible and off-camera. Shot and edited in the manner of cinema verite, there's no narrator, no back story. In sharp contrast to the activist documentaries that dominated 2003, The War Room has no obvious political agenda. Together they often operate on a kind of Good Cop/Bad Cop basis in their handling of the media. Stephanopoulos - dressier, compact and low-key, is Carville's junior but equally adroit, less emotional and more pragmatic. ![]() Carville - bald, hulking with a Cheshire Cat-like face stretched into a perpetual intensity, pops Tums and lights up the campaign headquarters and its war room with a piercing, animated Southern drawl. As many other reviewers have pointed out, the Mutt & Jeff pair are like something out of a Hollywood movie, perfectly cast and naturally charismatic. Though Clinton is glimpsed early on, as he pulls ahead in the primaries and moves toward a national campaign he all but disappears, and Pennebaker and Hegedus stick closely to strategist James Carville and media director George Stephanopoulos. Records and political stands aside, Tsongas was like a joke, a sub-Michael Dukakis, next to the Kennedy-esque, Oxford-educated, good ol' boy southerner. Perhaps the greatest irony watching the political documentary The War Room, now exactly a dozen years after its release, is how almost quaint the running of Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential Campaign seems in 2005 terms, and how much more cynical and disillusioned America has become since that election.ĭirected by the husband-wife team of DA Pennebaker (no periods, at least not in the credits) and Chris Hegedus, The War Room follows the Clinton camp from the New Hampshire primaries, when the aspiring Arkansas governor's biggest threat was the late Paul Tsongas, whose own campaign, in this modern TV age, was undone by an unruly name and an Elmer Fudd-like delivery. ![]()
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