How can you NOT put “Primary Colors” on your list. Written about the Clinton Administration by a former Clinton Administration worker (under a pseudonym). Watch it yourself and wipe the others off your list.

Since they’re comedies, these films are supposed to make you laugh, or at least smile.  Yet they more often remind me how cynically resigned I am to the political sausage factory we naively refer to as our democratic process. Certainly, “Bullworth” and “The Distinguished Gentleman” fill that bill, as well as the unmentioned and underrated “Dave” and “The American President”. 

Given how movies like the one’s mentioned above, and dramas like “All the President’s Men”, “Advise and Consent”, the original “All The King’s Men”, and others have shown the perversity and dry rot of American politics as it really is, it seems to me The American People suffer from an embedded mass delusion about the actual motives and intentions of those who run for office, but especially those who reach for the highest levers of power at the national level.

Most of us on the left are stuck hoping for another JFK or Bobby to come along, and will invest that hope in a stiff like John Kerry because he vaguely reminds us of who they were and where they came from. Or we’ll reject an actually closer approximation in John Edwards because he has a thick southern accent and therefore can’t possibly be like them.  Those on the right long for Ronnie’s successor, someone who can lie as smoothly and warmly as he did, the anti-Phil Gramm, so much so that the dullard Fred Thompson was hyped as The Second Coming, mostly because he too is a B-actor, until he imploded and was replaced by the cadaverous “war hero”, a diminutive Duke Wayne substitute, the anti-Oliver Stone, John McSame. 

We conflate personal liberty with more abstract notions of “freedom” and certainly with near-mythological, idealized “democracy”, the flagship of our putrified political process, a venal, empty, increasingly perpetual exercise—given the near-certainty of incumbent re-elections to a Congress with a 9% public approval rating, and presidential campaign cycles approaching 2 years and counting—dedicated to the self-aggrandizing acquisition of power, prestige and (hidden) money, paraded in front of the intellectually atrophied, masterfully distracted sparse electorate (regarding those who actually vote) as another grand audio-visual entertainment up there with the Olympics, Las Vegas, the World Series and the Superbowl, and in between weekly injections of “ABC Home Makeover” or “Desperate Housewives”, among other toxic insults to the intelligence of turtles.

Yet, just as we look for and occasionally find the embodiment of our hopes and dreams for ourselves in the heroes and anti-heroes of movies about politics and real leadership—Kevin Kline in “Dave” immediately comes to mind, as does on a more inspiring but tragic note the depictions of JFK, RFK and Ken O’Donnell in the amazing “Thirteen Days” about the 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis (during which the Kennedy brothers withstood the withering pressure of regressive power inside their own council demanding nuclear war with the Soviets, and later on may have paid for their courageous intransigence with their lives)—we continue to blithely accept the fluff and usually vacuous rhetoric of both candidates as if it has substantive meaning or in any way is a blueprint for our future well being as a citizenry. 

I for one am hoping beyond hope that Oliver Stone’s coming epic “W” will provide some sort of artistic catharsis for those of us who never bought this act, or for that matter the collective performances of the past 8 administrations, along with their trail of economic, financial, and social rubble masquerading as “government leadership”. A movie is the only place that catharsis may be available. It sure won’t be found in the next administration or Congress, God help us all.

See also Hail a/k/a Hail to the Chief starring Dan Resin, a little known 1973 political satire.

There’s an oldie but goodie from the 50s that needs to be seen—A Face in the Crowd (directed by Elia Kazan with Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal). It is a very penetrating look at media based folksy fascism and its undoing at the end.  In many ways it’s a kind of bizarro mirror image of Meet John Doe from the 30s (directed by Frank Capra with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck), where the protagonist was esssentially decent.

Don’t forget Gore Vidal’s wonderful “The Best Man”, with Henry Fonda & Cliff Robertson.

It’s been said but bears repeating: BULLWORTH! Best and funniest movie about politics (and race, and sex, and…..) in the past several years….

I would have included “Bob Roberts”.

you missed “Bulworth” - way better than the Will Smith offering IMO.