Another review of Inside the Bubble. As often when it comes to the Boston Phoenix talking about Kerry, this article is both pleasant to read and infuriating by moments. I guess the review can be best explain by the end of the article, which tells better than anything what the author thinks of Kerry.
Can somebody who knows the author give some background. I am wondering if he has some history with Kerry.
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/05025920.aspRequiem for a candidate
Reliving the John Kerry campaign at the movies
BY ADAM REILLY
LIKABLE SUBJECT At some points, Inside the Bubble actually humanizes Kerry.
Inside the Bubble, a new documentary about John Kerry’s failed 2004 presidential campaign, hasn’t hit theaters yet. In fact, it doesn’t even have a distributor. But judging from the buzz that’s developing around the film — which debuted at the New York Television Festival last week — that should change soon. Late last month, New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove hyped it as "potentially devastating," and quoted an unnamed source who said it could be "the silver bullet that kills Kerry’s presidential chances for 2008." The Note, ABC’s heavily trafficked political Web site, gushed that "there are almost no boring scenes in this film," and praised the Kerry-focused segments as "quite revealing."
Kerry partisans have been less kind. The Unofficial John Kerry Blog (kerryblog.blogspot.com) suggested that Inside the Bubble should be retitled The Snore Room — an unflattering reference to The War Room, the 1993 Clinton-campaign documentary — and dismissed its director, Steve Rosenbaum, as "a shill the infamous Swift Liars and the red elephants." (Rosenbaum says he votes Democratic.) They’re not the only skeptics. Recently, John Dickerson, Slate’s political correspondent, lamented the film’s focus on second-tier operatives and the corresponding absence of top advisors like Bob Shrum and John Sasso, each of whom barely shows up over the course of almost two hours.
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Split the difference, and you’ve got your answer. In the end, Inside the Bubble is both a flawed and compelling film — which is only fitting, since John Kerry was both a flawed and compelling candidate.
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All that said, the film is stronger and more engaging than its harshest detractors would suggest. To begin with, it drives home the grim realities of high-level campaign work — the anxiety, the monotony, the claustrophobia, the exhaustion — in an unexpectedly visceral way. The three main characters, Loftus, Morehouse, and Nicholson, have radically different temperaments: Loftus is voluble, Morehouse is an even-keeled family man, Nicholson is a joker with a dry sense of humor. But by the end of the film, we see each of them pushed to their physical and psychological limits.
More significantly, the film occasionally humanizes Kerry, and even casts him in a noble light. With the jockeying for ’08 already under way in earnest, it’s hard to find anyone excited by the prospect of a second Kerry run. The right candidate could have beaten Bush, or so the thinking goes, and Kerry simply wasn’t the right candidate. As a corollary to this point of view, there’s plenty of lingering anti-Kerry resentment. Why did you wait so long to fight back against the Swift Boat Veterans? Why, even after it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, did you say that had you known that at the time you still would have voted for the war? And why did you wear that stupid barn jacket?
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In yet another scene, Kerry sits in a locker room at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, waiting to do a satellite interview that’s plagued with technical difficulties. At one point, he talks to himself in Italian; at another, he jokes about the stench in the room. But what really stands out in this particular shot is the loneliness of the candidate. Kerry blinks into the klieg lights, laboring to amuse himself and his handlers and then switching into full interview mode (complete with full interview smile) as soon as the satellite connection is made. Along the way, we can see the fatigue set in, both emotional and physical. And we feel an unexpected surge of sympathy for this talented, accomplished, infuriatingly self-destructive man, who came so close to delivering us from Bush but who couldn’t get the job done. For that alone, Rosenbaum deserves a great deal of credit.