The War Room

See Bill run. See Bill stumble. See James Carville and George Stephanopoulos jump to the fax machines to perform heavy duty CPR. It’s all in a day’s work for the pair, who were the head honchos behind Bill Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, which is the elusive subject matter of The War Room, a documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

The subject is partly elusive by choice. The filmmakers weren’t given access to the inner sanctum of the Clinton campaign until after the New York State primary. Furthermore, neither Carville nor Stephanopoulos was dense enough to allow a film crew total access to every private meeting held during an election year in which mud flew like rain during a downpour.

The War Room does capture some of the outrageous high points of one of the most bizarre election years ever to unfold. There’s Gennifer Flowers doing a press conference that starts to play like a warm-up for Howard Stern’s show. George Bush goes on the attack, but winds up sounding more like an irate Chihuahua than the pit bull image he was trying to project. H. Ross Perot enters the race. Then he’s out. Then he’s in. Then he’s…ah, the heck with it.

Through it all, Clinton’s staff broke the world’s record for speed, as they zipped out corrections, refutations and their own brand of dirt and gossip. They were wired into the information superhighway and were determined to reinvent the techniques of electoral politics.

What The War Room captures best are the personality differences between Carville and Stephanopoulos. Amid the typically frantic state of the campaign headquarters, Craville cruises like a hungry shark caught snacking between meals. Maybe it was just the insistent munching of candy giving him a sugar rush, but Carville is repeatedly presented as carrying on like a tightly strung lunatic. Stephanopoulos has his moments of boyish enthusiasm, but most often he’s the calm center to Hurricane Carville’s storm.

There are a few surprises in The War Room, and its main weakness is that the actual campaign was more surreal than it appears on film. But it offers a good feel for the hardball maneuvers and idiotic scrambling that make up our political system.