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PRIMARY COLORS | PAGE 2 OF 2 It's even worse for Emma Thompson as Stanton's wife, Susan. Thompson is marvelous at suggesting what this stunningly intelligent woman gives up to support her husband. When, over dinner, a potential political ally asks Susan if she minds if he and Stanton discuss business, she answers, "Oh, no, that's how I learn," and Thompson lets you know just what it costs Susan's pride to say those words. Thompson shows how what Susan suppresses in public comes out in private as finely honed rage. But the movie hasn't laid the foundation that would allow Thompson's performance to deepen. There's no anguish when Susan slaps Jack after hearing a news report of his infidelity, and no anguish in his sheepish apology -- just the sense of watching gossip drained of juice for the purpose of being passed off as "human drama." A big part of that problem is Klein's book, which achieves neither the imaginative transformation that fiction can give to real events nor the specificity that comes from careful, acknowledged -- and honestly reported -- observation. "Primary Colors," the book, is all innuendo. I'm hardly the first person to note that Klein's publishing his novel anonymously was a clever, sleazy ploy, allowing him to imply that the book was written by someone in a position to know all the dirty laundry, and also permitting him to take liberties that he couldn't with nonfiction . What wasn't foreseeable is how Klein's desire to have it both ways suits everything noncommittal about Nichols' slick, shallow and finally sour style. It wasn't until I saw the PBS "American Masters" special on Nichols and May a few years back that what had always bugged me about his movies clicked. As a director, Nichols seems never to have realized that drama takes place on a deeper level than revue comedy (although his astonishing performance last year in "The Designated Mourner" doesn't have that weakness). Sincerity and simplicity seem beyond him when he's behind the camera. He conceives of people as readily classifiable types. Because he has no interest in the mystery of human beings, he's unable to shoot a simple scene of a man speaking about how enrolling in an adult-literacy program changed his life in a way that makes you feel he's really connected with the actor. (Luckily, the actor in this case, the terrific Mykelti Williamson, knows how to connect with an audience.) Which isn't to say that "Primary Colors" would be a better movie if it labeled Stanton solely as either a political operator or as a true believer. It's just that Nichols doesn't have enough complexity as a filmmaker to see how both those sides of a character can be inextricable parts of the whole. His intentions change from scene to scene, from satire to black comedy to naturalistic drama. Sometimes Nichols seems to be coasting on the naughtiness of this insider's glimpse of life on the campaign trail; other times the movie is in poker-faced earnest. It's a confused, rhythmless piece of work. Characters like Billy Bob Thornton's James Carville figure and Maura Tierney's Daisy drop out of the movie before their dissatisfactions with the Stanton campaign have registered. And given that Lester's Henry, with his thin, light voice, has worked for a congressman, the character's naiveté about the political process seems suspect and annoying. It's impossible to see how Henry's political education could resonate in the context of Nichols' only-a-game cynicism. The deepest conviction here is that nothing changes, no candidate is substantially different from any other and that only romantic fools would think otherwise. That's just the kind of approach that journalists -- dismissive of any claim that politicians are capable of being morally fired up by issues or that voters see anything beyond carefully managed image -- latch onto as a true, accurate view of politics. And damned if, in the current New Yorker, the magazine's senior editor (and former chief speech writer to Jimmy Carter) Hendrik Hertzberg doesn't laud "Primary Colors" as virtually the only "morally and humanly complex" American film about the American electoral process. For Hertzberg, "Primary Colors" is an antidote to the sentimentality that he claims has pervaded American political movies since "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," what he dismisses as "hatred of politics masked by ostentatious reverence for the constitutional forms that politics alone can bring to life." He identifies the main carrier of this disease (that's how he describes it) in "Primary Colors" as Kathy Bates' Libby Holden (a character based on Clinton assistant Betsey Wright), an old colleague of the Stantons with many campaigns and one mental breakdown under her belt. "Primary Colors" finally hinges on the limits beyond which Libby will not go for either old friends or political expediency. She and Henry are dispatched to dig up dirt on Stanton's prime opponent, Gov. Fred Picker (Larry Hagman). What they find is damaging enough, though something quite different from the hotbed of corruption they expected. Libby tells the Stantons that using the information would turn them into the type of people they once claimed to despise. The Stantons can't use it fast enough, and whatever shred of idealism Libby has left is crushed. The Stantons' justifications for leaking the material get as much of a hearing as Libby's reasons for suppressing it. And the movie makes it clear that Libby has no tolerance for the sometimes intolerable choices that politics entails. The high road she advocates might, finally, be the yellow brick road; she doesn't grasp that you can't do anything for people if you don't get elected. But if that sounds like a more mature view of politics on paper, it doesn't feel like one when you're watching this movie, because we feel an emotional attachment to Libby, and we don't to the Stantons. Bates, who is sensational, is the only character here the audience does connect with. She takes what at first appears to be a stock role -- raucous and profane -- and gives it a genuine earthiness and, surprisingly, a genuine delicacy. In the world of real politics, big-hearted Libby is cruising for a bruising, but she has the sort of passion that is, finally, the only moral justification for all the machinations and maneuvers and compromises politics entails. We don't know what fires up Jack Stanton, or even if anything does. Bates doesn't get the final word, but she subverts everything that follows her performance. What makes "Primary Colors" a movie of its moment is less that it appears at a time when Clinton is being bedeviled by scandals (the dumb luck of "Wag the Dog," its release coinciding with both the Lewinsky affair and the Iraq standoff, is far more pertinent on that score) than that it makes passion in politics look as naive as the expectation of purity, the province of unbalanced losers. That would surely seem strange to the political geniuses (like LBJ) who saw the deal-making of politics as the means to realizing a vision. But visions, like passion, seem to be deeply unfashionable in politics right now. Nichols doesn't give us the poignancy of a compromised victory, or of an empty victory, because he doesn't seem to have a notion that there's such a thing as a substantive victory. If "Primary Colors" doesn't attract an audience it won't be because, as Hertzberg suggests, Americans are rubes who can't deal with the hard truths ("'Primary Colors' has something you don't often encounter at the multiplex: wisdom," he wrote). But it may be because it confirms our most cynical and despairing suspicions that getting elected isn't a means, even a sometimes dirty means, to anything but an end in itself. That turns out to be a good fit for Nichols, who, as a filmmaker, has always cared most about appearing knowing and above it all. In the world outlined by "Primary Colors," this is as good as a declaration of candidacy. SALON | March 20, 1998  Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.