The US presidential election takes up an enormous amount of space in the news cycle; even a reset and abbreviated race, like the one between the late-breaking candidate Kamala Harris and the eternal rerun Donald Trump, starts to feel downright eternal in the final sprint. It’s an event that dominates the media for the better part of every fourth year in the calendar (and a not-inconsiderable part of the other three), not without good reason: these races have been enormously consequential, as are many of the down-ballot races squeezed out of as much attention. Yet this urgency is not something often well-captured in movies about US elections, which frequently fall somewhere between flop-sweaty dramatic earnestness or toothless comedic mildness.
Maybe contemporary films can’t compete with the breathlessness of modern campaign coverage – and they may not want to successfully imitate their numbing repetition. All the King’s Men, which won the Oscar for best picture of 1949, is one of the most prominent dramas to follow a series of elections as an iterative process, chronicling the various campaigns of Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) on his way to the governor’s mansion of an unnamed southern state. (He’s based on Louisiana’s Huey Long.) Some of the story turns creak 75 years later, but what feels prescient (or at least unchanging) about it is a portrait of a man subsumed by his voracious stump activity, which starts to feel like Stark’s lifeblood, rather than a means to an end. The campaign-first feeling reaches a logical conclusion in 1972’s The Candidate, where his initial status as a lost cause emboldens Bill McKay (Robert Redford) to speak his mind, which increases his popularity, which in turn flattens out his messaging closer to meaningless – until he actually wins, and no one on his staff can tell him what’s supposed to happen next.
