Delayed Reaction: The War Room

The Pitch: Put cameras inside the Bill Clinton campaign headquarters and hope they say something juicy.

A documentary about the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, told from the perspective the the campaign quarters' war room.

In the interest of complete transparency, I saw this movie so I could better appreciate the Documentary Now! episode parodying it. That said, it is an interesting documentary in its own right.

This is no doubt a sanitized cut of what was really going on in the war room for Clinton's 1992 election, but they still capture a lot of the spirit  of what goes on. Most of it - debating how to edit a 30 second commercial, chasing leads about a republican campaign sign "scandal", strategizing talking points for the camp before and after debates - are things that I've seen in several shows like The West Wing and Veep in one form or another. No doubt those shows used this documentary as part of their research, and there's something about it being the real thing, actually seeing it happen, that pulls me in more. I love how so much of their big crises are things average people hardly even notice. James Carville is determined to get "Read my lips. No new taxes" in a commercial three times rather than two. I don't think I'd give that a second thought if I saw the commercial, but that was a fight he wasn't willing to lose.

I'm also struck by how many of the talking points are the same as they are today. I don't think everyone fully appreciates how slow and cyclical government/politics is. You could take Carville's war room speech at the end and apply it to nearly any election and it's equally true. That's both sad and comforting depending on the mood I'm in.

Overall, I didn't think of this as all that political of a documentary. It's not like watching a Michael Moore movie. I don't think it has an agenda. Of course, the talking points are naturally political. However, I don't think the filmmaker is trying to assign a value judgment. I often refer to the two main types of documentary: one's that are investigating and one's that  are trying to prove a point (Or, I suppose an easier dichotomy is whether the film knows it's conclusion after or before it's made). The War Room is in the former category. I think it started from the idea "I wonder what it's like in a war room" rather than something like "let's prove that Clinton was better by filming in his war room". It's a subtle but important difference. That's also why I can get something out of watching it 25 years later.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend