PRIMARY COLORS

The movie PRIMARY COLORS has little relationship to the scathingly insightful book about the first Clinton campaign for the U.S. presidency written by Joe Klein.

The movie opens with a disenchanted yet still idealistic Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) evaluating the hand-shaking technique of Jack Stanton (John Travolta), a Southern governor running as a Democratic nominee for President. Travolta as Stanton is made up to look like President Clinton, even to the point of talking and acting like him. The movie also uses exact replicas of Clinton’s 1992 campaign posters, changed only in candidate’s name.

Candidate Stanton moves on from his encounter with Henry to an inner city high school that is dilapidated but reportedly has “a great library.” After hearing the woeful story of a previously illiterate man who benefited from a reading program at the school library, Stanton tells his own story about his Uncle Charlie who also couldn’t read − a story that is totally fabricated for the occasion. While showing Stanton around the school, a clumsy school board member falls on the stairs and shows a revealing part of her anatomy to the camera. Before the day is over, she and Stanton are in a hotel suite having sex while campaign aides wait in the next room. The Governor walks out to receive a phone call from his wife Susan (Emma Thompson), talking to her as if everything is fine.

Between flights later, Susan meets Stanton on an airport runway and confronts him about various problems. He tries to defuse her and grabs both of her breasts with Henry standing right there. Despite the scene he has witnessed, Henry eventually commits to the campaign because he believes Stanton is going to be a history-making President who shares Henry’s idealistic, noble vision. Later, however, Stanton gets a 16-year-old girl pregnant while his political strategist, Richard Jemmons (Billy Bob Thornton), propositions a woman in front of everyone at a party and even exhibits his private male organ to everyone. At another point, Stanton throws a nasty temper tantrum directed at Henry for making a mistake. The candidate throws a cell phone out the window of a moving vehicle while he spews obscenities and profanities.

PRIMARY COLORS then attempts to portray Stanton as a noble politician who refuses to do negative campaign advertisements despite receiving negative barbs from his opponents. Lying, cheating and adultery are shown as okay, so long as you don’t participate in negative personal campaigning. Director Mike Nichols also peppers the film with scenes where Stanton gives lip service to God through Thanksgiving Day prayers as well as statements such as “God bless.” These scenes seem to endorse politicians who trivialize God and religion, even when they use them to gain political power.

Eventually, Stanton’s staff confronts his wife Susan about the potential fallout from his sexual escapades. Living in denial, Susan is clearly more concerned with grasping power through her husband’s election than she is with his unfaithfulness. Her character duplicates the familiar scene of the faithful wife holding her unfaithful candidate/husband’s hand, lying through her teeth on a talk show interview and telling the world that her husband has done no wrong. She plays this game until the camera shuts off. Near the end of the campaign, however, her husband’s lesbian troubleshooter in the campaign, Libby Holden, played by Kathy Bates, commits suicide over Stanton’s decision to start running negative campaign ads.

Director Mike Nichols is forever trying to depict Stanton as the man who cares about things like the minimum wage for workers. While his staff are all arguing over strategies, Henry notices Stanton sitting alone in a donut shop talking to the clerk, who is obviously a simple, diligent man who works faithfully for $4.85 an hour. Stanton’s sins are portrayed as irrelevant next to his “compassion” for people. If that weren’t bad enough, the cinematic quality of Nichols’ film is not good. Lighting, settings and photography left a lot to be desired.

Reportedly, President Clinton exchanged favors with lead actor John Travolta, a Scientologist, to obtain a more favorable rewrite of Joe Klein’s original novel. According to GEORGE magazine, Clinton helped the Church of Scientology, a religious cult with New Age, science fiction metaphysics, get a more favorable hearing by Germany’s government in Bonn which has banned Scientology in Germany. Clinton also reportedly wooed director Mike Nichols by inviting him to summer cookouts during Clinton’s Martha’s Vineyard vacations. Such political manipulation of a Hollywood movie is extremely frightening, if true.

This political manipulation of the mass media of entertainment is reminiscent of the National Socialist propaganda machine run by Dr. Goebbels. It is well to remember that: Adolf Hitler was elected by the most cultured and literate electorate in the world; that his popularity was extremely high even in the midst of the most outrageous scandals; that the people of Germany voted for their pocket books rather than for justice and integrity; that Nazi propaganda influenced the German people to shift from 80% against mercy killings (read the extermination of undesirable people) to 60% in favor within a one-year period of time as the result of several movies produced under the auspices of Dr. Goebbels; and, that even the New York Times in the U.S. suggested that Adolf Hitler was a Christian because he closed all his speeches with a “God Bless,” while behind the scenes Hitler was reviving pagan worship practices and searching for the demonic Spear of Destiny.

PRIMARY COLORS is two hours and 14 minutes of stomach-turning apologetics for the debased lifestyle of a politician with no moral underpinnings. Filled with numerous obscenities, the movie is full of homosexuality, bisexuality, infidelity, suicide, unfaithfulness, and deceit. Watching it is like having to sit through more than two hours of infomercials for a decadent, debased and even demonic U.S. President.