Five Political Films

By David Sirota

David Sirota is a political journalist, nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist and New York Times bestselling author living in Denver. His most recent book, The Uprising, was released in June 2008. He is widely known for his reporting on political corruption, globalization and working-class economic issues often ignored by both of America's political parties. His weekly column, which was launched by Creators Syndicate in the fall of 2007, now appears in newspapers with a combined daily circulation of more than 1.6 million readers. He is also senior editor at In These Times magazine and blogs at credoaction.com.

FilmInFocus asked Sirota to pick his five favorite films about political campaigns.

• Wag the Dog
  
  This dark comedy is simultaneously hilarious and sad — probably because the over-the-top machinations and tactics parody the tragicomedy that really goes on inside modern campaigns. In a political world where style trumps substance, visuals outweigh policy and soulless campaign consultants are celebrated as intellectual luminaries, writer/director David Mamet gives us characters like the Fad King (Denis Leary) and strategist Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro); manufactured sob stories created with Hollywood blue screens; and songs like Good Old Shoe. This is political satire at its most vicious — and accurate.
  


• The Distinguished Gentleman
  
  From the moment Florida huckster Thomas Jefferson Johnson (Eddie Murphy) runs for Congress by pretending to be a recently deceased incumbent with the same name, this movie is ridiculing Washington politics. Johnson wins his race solely on name recognition, achieving his dream of going to Congress and putting his skills as a professional con man to work. The casting carries this one. Any flick featuring Joe Don Baker as an energy lobbyist named Olaf Andersen and Lane Smith as a corrupt chairman named Dick Dodge is going to hit that elusive sweet spot: the one that perfectly calibrates caricature and reality.
  


• Brewster's Millions
  
  To inherit $300 million, Montgomery Brewster (Richard Pryor) is charged with the near-impossible task of wasting $30 million in 30 days without accruing a single asset — and without telling anyone about the contest. So how does he do it? He runs for public office. The message that big-time elections have become a huge waste of cash may be a subtext in this slapstick comedy, but Brewster's outraged campaign slogan asking citizens to vote "none of the above" is as relevant in today's money politics as it was when this movie first hit the silver screen.
  


• Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
  
  Twenty-nine year-old neophyte Jeff Smith has a radical idea: he's going to run for Congress against the son of a famous governor who has the backing of Missouri's entire political Establishment. In this documentary of Smith's 2004 primary campaign, we see how despite today's idealistic rhetoric, the forces of corruption and status quo still run the Democratic Party.
  


• The Candidate
  
  It's something of a cliché to say the film, The Candidate, is a great movie about politics — but the last line alone in this story of a California election makes it a classic. After a grueling campaign in which Bill McKay (Robert Redford) goes punchy parroting his meaningless (and eerily Obama-esque) "there's got to be a better way" motto, the candidate for U.S. Senate wins in an upset. Standing amidst his exuberantly cheering supporters, McKay is shown in the last moment of the film helplessly turning to his political consultant asking "What do we do now?"

Five Political Films

By Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner). His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the status, in the wake of the Clinton Wars and the 2000 Florida recount, as one of the very rare books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From the summer of 2003 until 2005, he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007, he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con.

FilmInFocus asked Perlstein to pick his five favorite films about political campaigns.

• The Earrings of Madame de
  
  For me the best political films are like the best politicians: they bequeath us a language to express inchoate moods we don't quite have the words ourselves to articulate. The most dazzling example? Max Ophuls' deceptively sumptuous The Earrings de Madame de (1953), in which the frivolities and petty affairs of Europe's idle rich are revealed, in the final shot, as a metaphor for the callous indifference with which they send peasants off to war.
  
  
• The Candidate
  
  Michael Ritchie's The Candidate (1972) is extraordinary in grasping the dilemmas faced by the 1972 Democratic nominee for president, George McGovern, better than McGovern did in real time. You're never sure whether Robert Redford wins his Senate seat in the end because he sold out, because he maintained a saving margin of idealism, because people finally saw through the demagoguery of his opponent — or just because he was so damned good looking. It's all marvelously ambiguous, just like an election in real life.
  
  
• Lumumba
  
  Great political films are often great because the give us foreshortened, visual means to grasp the abstract mysteries of political change. I was fascinated by the verisimilitude with which Raoul Peck was able to capture what it feels like when one political moment transforms itself into another — here, in the case of the process of independence for the nation of Congo. It certainly rung true enough for the ex-CIA hands depicted in the film, who forced HBO to bleep out his name by threat of lawsuit if they showed it.
  
  
• 1776
  
  A lot of it is simply sheer, brilliant, Gilbert & Sullivan-style fun, which should be enough to recommend it on its own. But I'd also be hard pressed to name a film that better captures the drama of true democratic deliberation than 1776: it renders parliamentary procedure scintillating. A musical about the thrill of dangerous ideas, it compresses the paradoxes at the heart of the American experiment.
  
  
• Punishment Park
  
  I've never seen a film that more convincingly projects the sheer rage Americans felt toward one another in 1970 than Peter Watkin's astonishing mockumentary Punishment Park. In it, a group of radicals are basically tortured to death after conviction by a kangaroo court of "Silent Majority" citizens in a remote desert; both sides were played by type-cast non-professional actors. It feels like a family dinner table argument over the Vietnam War breaking out into a shooting match. After a screening, representatives from 24 PBS stations across the country agreed they could never show a movie this intense on American TV.