Avis des critiques

The script from Nichols's most venerable collaborator, Elaine May, is tops and Emma Thompson absolutely crushes it as the ambitious first-lady-in-waiting. The movie definitely deserves another look in light of Hillary Clinton's campaign--may we recommend an impromptu double feature of PRIMARY COLORS and THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR?

What a film like Primary Colors loses in immediate responsiveness it gains in reflective distance. It offers a calmer, more lucid perspective of the political process, compared to Scandal's headlong dive into its vicissitudes... Where Primary Colors offers the perspective of an ordinary citizen whose desire to change conditions for the better prompts him to join the political system, Scandal entirely disregards the American people, at least as a civic entity.

Nichols's emotionally garish, visually dull film was the era's more direct cinematic response to Clinton, a barely disguised account of the Arkansas governor's rise to the presidency. The film starred a pudgy, white-haired John Travolta doing an SNL-guest-host-grade impression of Clinton (here known as Jack Stanton), Billy Bob Thornton channeling James Carville, and Emma Thompson chewing on an American accent like water taffy as a simplified, neurotic incarnation of Hillary.

Although it's refreshing to find in a Hollywood movie that the main audience identification figure is a black man and the principal moral spokesperson is an overweight lesbian (nicely played by Kathy Bates), the filmmakers are still too far inside the media mentality they're trying to describe to come up with many fresh insights about Clinton.