The War Room Movie Review

The Clinton team had been in the White House for less than a year when The War Room was released, but in many ways, the campaign and election of 1992 seemed incredibly far away, even then. P. F. Bentley's striking photographs for his book on the campaign, Portrait of Victory, were shot entirely in black and white, and these timeless yet pleasantly dated images are the ones we remember best. The War Room, the 1993 documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, is further dated since Clinton's campaign team gave the press such generous access to behind-the-scenes strategy-making that we somehow took for granted how unique that was. In this film, the Clintons and Gores are seen largely through news footage, and Pennebaker and Hegedus focus instead on the efforts of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos to orchestrate the attack on George Bush. There are the inevitable segues: a Star Magazine representative stands between the now-famous splashy tabloid cover and Gennifer Flowers, trying vainly to pretend that the circus is a dignified press conference. In fact, hardly anything is an accident in a political campaign; the press reports every “disclosure” in the form of late-breaking news, as if all the campaign teams didn't repeatedly feed these so-called leaks until they catch fire. Sometimes, they never do. Carville tried to make something out of a report on Portuguese television that Bush-Quayle campaign materials were printed south of the border with cheap labor. But the story couldn't be nailed down with enough corroborative detail, and eventually it fizzled. Carville was luckier with his efforts to add key phrases to a major campaign speech. Meanwhile, Mary Matalin defended her candidate, George Bush, and 21st century audiences might wish that the personal relationship between Carville and Matalin had been made a little more clear. (How many details do we remember about individual members of past campaign teams, anyway?) As election day approached, both Carville and Stephanopoulos resorted to eerie gallows humor, presumably to stave off last-minute doubts and superstitions. The July 1993 suicide of longtime Clinton associate Vince Foster revealed a dark side to the political landscape that we didn't see in the glory days of November 1992. The War Room supplies counterpoint to the old myth of smoke-filled rooms behind closed doors, while fueling a new myth about the folksy value of apparent candor; clearly, all the candor in the world won't blunt the brutality of contemporary politics.

1993 (PG) 93m/C D: Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker; C: D.A. Pennebaker, Kevin Rafferty. National Board of Review Awards ‘93: Best Feature Documentary; Nominations: Academy Awards ‘93: Best Feature Documentary. VHS, LV, Closed Caption, DVD