Sky K Studios Movie Blog

The Candidate

Bill McKay (Robert Redford) practicing his stump speech in a car

Paranoia and suspicion are the defining characteristics of the great 1970's political movies: Three Days of the Condor, All the President's Men, and The Parallax View all reflect a deep suspicion of the government and politics, while the anti-heroes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Bonnie and Clyde all suggest that if this is society, then anti-social behavior is no crime (or perhaps that crime is the least anti-social behavior).

Although it shares a lot with the above list—more the power-and-politics set than the mythological one—The Candidate has a strikingly different tone. It replaces the deep suspicion with deep ambivalence.

Redford's character is the son of a former California governor who keeps his distance from electoral politics while he goes about farmworker and environmental activism; he struggles with the message discipline necessitated by campaigning, but never entirely defies the restrictions (like, say, Bulworth) or sells out entirely. (Yes, I know I've listed exclusively movies with Robert Redford or Warren Beatty, many of which have complements in the other's work. That's a different essay.) The movie clearly endorses McKay's own politics; in one scene, he nearly spits in the face of a Teamster president because of the Teamsters' efforts to bust the UFW's organizing drives. It offers suspicion of the forces that whirl around McKay on the road to the U.S. Senate, but never casts any of them as particularly malign; Peter Boyle's campaign director is manipulative, but he's not evil.

The famous last line, "What do we do now?" might suggest that the movie takes as cynical a look at electoral politics as Three Days of the Condor takes at spy wars. It doesn't. It exposes the race as a dangerous comedy, but it maintains sympathy for those who would run it. It mocks the tools, but not those who use them.

posted by Josh K-sky at 11:24 AM