A vote for 'Candidate'

"A Perfect Candidate," which opens today at the Charles, preaches pretty loudly to the converted, but if you put that aside, it's a royally entertaining and deeply cynical look at the election process in America -- specifically, Virginia -- in the sound-bite-driven '90s.

Just how a conservative Senate candidate like Oliver North, he of Marine Corps and Iran-contra fame, could let avowedly liberal filmmakers like R. J. Cutler and David Van Taylor get so close is a question only his handlers can answer.

Perhaps egos were stroked, vanities petted, or the staff thought the Colonel's charisma was overwhelming and campaign director Mark Goodin thought he was much smarter than he was. But North emerges from the pulping pretty well pulped: He looks not only like a liar but a weepy creep.

But to Cutler and Van Taylor's abiding credit, they spare no one: They are even-handed in their contempt for the fundamentally absurd process and the mendacious, shallow men it involves.

Their merciless camera reveals North's opponent, Chuck Robb, to be an awkward groper, sometimes even desperately goofy. At one point he confuses a laundromat for a lunchroom and goes in to order lunch from the washing machines. When some passing citizens tell him what's going on, he unleashes some of the lamest repartee on record.

They even show us Bill Clinton adroitly and cynically stage managing the campaign's turning point, when avowed Robb-hater Doug Wilder, ex-governor of Virginia, agreed to swallow his pride and endorse the big stiff Chuck. Watch carefully and you'll see Clinton suavely manipulating the two former enemies up close to him for a nice, tight three-shot that would certainly show up in all major media -- as, of course, it did.

But poor North receives the brunt of the brutality. The camera cannot lie: It chronicles the gooeyness with which North polishes tin-plate pieties for his true believers, invoking God and country and family like the garlic to drive away vampires and get himself a fancy job. It also sees his flaw -- an emotionalism that comes to feel quite sickening. He cries promiscuously, at the flag, at old people, at green grass, at the sunset.

Still, North is usually seen from afar; he granted no intimacy. The dark genius of "A Perfect Candidate" is the professional guru Goodin, a fleshy, tough, competent presence who can be looked at as the movie's bete noir or Dirty Harry, depending on your prejudices. Goodin, a gray-haired conservative apparatchik who once lost a big job because he circulated rumors that Tom Foley was gay, is Phil Donahue with too much flesh and eyes like laser nozzles. But he is smart and quick, and watching him is fascinating.

Evidently a good sport, he let Cutler and Van Taylor in tight. The pros in Goodin's clever but nasty little group sit around and dis everybody, crow over their triumphs, bitch about the press, plot the morrow's dark stratagems, all over a late-night old fashioned. They're good old boys having the damnedest fun in their lives, and the footage suggests how the process has become so mired in getting it done that it no longer has anything to do with anything real. Issues are simply trump cards to be manipulated.

The film misses its money shot, when North gets the bad news that he hasn't made it. Instead we catch him, having made peace with his loss, heading toward the podium for the NTC concession speech, which is probably his most graceful and least corn-poney moment.

Don Baker, a Washington Post reporter who figures prominently in the film, will be at the Charles Theatre, 1711 N. Charles St., after tonight's 8 p.m. screening to discuss the film.

'A Perfect Candidate'

Directed by R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor

Released by Seventh Art Releasing

Unrated

Sun score: ***

Pub Date: 10/04/96