When a race for president turns into personal outings and a change in the whole political scenery the sex scandal of Senator Gary Hart, who was the Front Runner of the presidential election of 1988.
By Julia Richarz & Danilo Salazar
The London Film Festival presents ‘The Front Runner’, where Hugh Jackman plays as Gary Hart in the retelling of the 1988 presidential election. Director Jason Reitman, who started as a director assistant in his father’s movies and who is now known for questioning stories and history. He asks the question “How did we get here?”. Reitman focuses on the historical facts and proceeds on the assumptions that most Americans only know half of what happened with Gary Hart in 1988.
Reitman wrote the plot in company with political journalist Matt Bai and Hilary Clinton’s former press secretary Jay Carson, making an adaptation of Bai’s 2015 book ‘All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid’. The movie shows the life of a charismatic and wit presidential candidate who is most likely to become the leader of the nation until something unexpected happened, forcing him to drop out of the race.
Hart’s life and presidential career seem to come apart when his affair with Donna Rice was discovered. This was something that the press was trying to hide from the nation. Harts’s affair made her wife become a spotlight to the press, which made the press starting following her everywhere. Besides this, due to Hart’s withdrawal from the politics, America got George H.W Bush as a president and after three decades of the happening people still, have vivid memories of the real story.
Reitman aims with the movie to unveil different historical aspects that weren’t revealed during this period in America. He wanted to clean the story from the fog that the press wanted to put on it to cover Hart’s private life. Moreover, the author wanted to demonstrate how technology was evolving so quickly in that time, showing from fax machines to satellite-equipped TV news vans, without fetishizing, this evolution allowed the media to have a better control of their content without letting something important pass by.
Find the Trailer Below:
