A Paint-By-Numbers Picture
Primary Colors
Cast: John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Adrian Lester, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Maura Tierney, Larry Hagman
Director: Mike Nichols
Movie Help Web Popcorn Kernels: 
Primary Colors should have been an easy five stars.
The 1998 movie has the sort of qualifications that make producers drool with envy: an award-winning director, an Academy Award-nominated screenplay based on a best-selling novel, and a talented cast anchored by a box-office star.
Unfortunately, like too many book-to-film adaptations, Primary Colors violates the laws of conservation, losing more than it gains in its move to the silver screen. Though this movie would be entertaining for first-time viewers — especially folks who haven't read the book — I can't give it anything more than a lukewarm reception.
An overconfident candidate's combustible campaign
Primary Colors, based on the book by Joe Klein (aka Anonymous), covers several months in the presidential campaign of Jack Stanton (John Travolta). Stanton is currently the governor of an unspecified Southern state, but has always harbored higher ambitions — born not of egotism, he says, but of faith, hope, and the desire to serve.
Since a sense of destiny isn't enough to win office, Stanton has attracted an experienced, if volatile, group of supporters to help him along:
• Susan Stanton (Thompson), the candidate's smart, determined wife;
• Henry Burton (Lester), a former legislative aide who becomes Stanton's campaign manager;
• Richard Jemmons (Thornton), a savvy yet unsophisticated political strategist;
• Daisy (Tierney), an excellent media advisor despite her lack of a last name (it's Green in the book);
• and Libby Holden (Bates), the "Dustbuster" who speaks her mind whenever she wants, wherever she wants, to whomever she wants.
Stanton's initial problem is that no one's ever heard of him. But before you can say "be careful what you wish for," he becomes known for all the wrong reasons. As Burton and his cohorts try to dodge scandals and neutralize the competition, the campaign manager learns more about his candidate than he'd ever wanted to know.
This isn't the "Bill and Hillary" story, is it?
Read my lips: this is fiction!
That's not to say that certain people in Primary Colors won't remind you of real-life figures. They should. Political columnist Joe Klein, who wrote the original novel in 1996, covered the presidential race four years earlier for New York magazine. In both the book and the movie, there are obvious parallels between the Clintons and the Stantons, particularly with the character questions that dog both candidates.
However, Klein makes it clear in his author's note ("...this is a work of fiction and the usual rules apply") that he doesn't view his work as biography. Neither does director Mike Nichols. Primary Colors contains no person-to-camera interviews, no flashbacks, nothing in the way of shot selection, lighting, or editing to indicate that the movie was designed for the documentary category.
The acting: a split vote
I didn't play the who-would-I-cast-as-who game while I was reading the book. But if I had, Emma Thompson (one of my faves) would have been a shoo-in for Susan Stanton. Though the rough-and-tumble of American politics is a far cry from Jane Austen, Thompson still delivers a finely textured performance, a delicate balance of intelligence, strength and warmth. The only jarring note is her Chicago accent; I kept wanting to say, "Emma, you have a lovely English accent of your own. Use it!"
I would never have picked Adrian Lester to play Henry Burton, because I'd hadn't heard of him before seeing this film. But Thompson's fellow countryman acquits himself honorably as the idealistic aide who's seduced, then disillusioned by his candidate. (For folks who have read the book: Burton is mostly the campaign's eyes and ears instead of its conscience, so Lester doesn't carry the whole movie on his shoulders.)
Most of the other actors give solid performances, within the limits of their assignments. That's an important caveat, because several people — Billy Bob Thornton and Maura Tierney, in particular — have a pretty low time-on-screen/pages ratio, though they make the best of what they do have. The best-known name logging the fewest minutes (practically a cameo) is Larry Hagman, who's quite impressive as a reluctant candidate dragged back into the political game.
There are a couple of disappointments in the cast. The minor one is Kathy Bates as troubleshooter Libby Holden. I was hoping for a wildly energetic performance; unfortunately, the parking-lot scene in Fried Green Tomatoes is livelier and sharper than anything Bates does in this movie.
And the major disappointment? John Travolta, as Jack Stanton. This "portrayal" for lack of a better term, is flat from beginning to end. A fixed grin and an air of genial arrogance aren't enough to sustain interest for one scene, let alone an entire movie — yet that's pretty much all Travolta gives us.
The adaptation: should have gotten rewrite
Goodfellas is an example of a brilliant book-to-movie adaptation; director Martin Scorsese decided what story he wanted to tell, chose material accordingly, then added his own creations to the mix.
The storyline of Primary Colors, on the other hand, has as much depth and complexity as a dot-to-dot picture. While Elaine May's screenplay sparkles in a few places (usually when it lifts one-liners from Klein's book), the movie as a whole feels perfunctory. It's almost as if Nichols and May had operated with a checklist:
"Strategy meeting?"
"Got it."
"Big campaign speech?"
"Got it."
"Press conference where hairdresser accuses candidate of affair?"
"Got it."
Just about everywhere, theatrics and choreography win out over substance, aided by the overly dramatic and highly annoying score that swells at pivotal moments.
In addition, although the film has reduced various subplots to a few scenes, includes things that refer to those subplots, and that will make no sense to people who haven't read the novel. There's one shot near the end, for instance, of a woman in a skirt standing outside a church door. In the book, this is the prelude to an important scene between Henry and Daisy; in the movie, it gets no explanation, and leads absolutely nowhere.
Nichols and May add only a few things of their own devising, most notably a subplot with Henry's girlfriend (Rebecca Walker). She's not a major character — she gets one paragraph in the book, and two scenes in the movie — and seems to exist just to tell Henry that Stanton is not the candidate of his dreams. (Relationships in general get short shrift in Primary Colors.)
Verdict: two stars for those who have read the book, two and a half stars for anyone else
When I did my first draft of this review, I was actually thinking this was a three-star movie. But upon further review, I found that some talented acting is all that stands between Primary Colors and the bottom of the heap.
In their defense, Nichols and May had a difficult task: converting a novel told in the first person to a film shown in the third person. Joe Klein's novel brings readers inside the psyche of the candidate and his campaign manager, farther than a movie can be expected to reach in two hours or less. The problem is, the director, the screenwriter, and their candidate didn't produce anything half as compelling.
