What’s the best film about US politics?

After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West Wing series could do a lot worse than watch the films below.

The first is Nixon (1995), Oliver’s epic three-and-a-half hour movie starring Anthony Hopkins as America’s disgraced 37th president – a surprisingly generous portrayal of a man as reviled by the Left, in his day, as Donald Trump is now. In a film much better than the usual biopic-by-numbers, Stone and Hopkins give us Nixon in all his complexity: spiteful, considerate, petty and broadminded, self-pitying and courageous (the list goes on). Hopkins may not look or sound like the real Nixon yet makes a completely plausible stand-in, as a man tormented by his own inadequacy – seething with resentment against his rich, better-looking opponent Jack Kennedy, forever uncomfortable in his own skin, hunched and defensive against the world. Yet he’s also a political giant, addicted to intrigue as a kind of creativity and desperate to ‘give History a nudge.’ Brooding and lavish, with a stellar cast and a score by John Williams, Nixon’s 150 or so minutes fairly zip by.

If Trump’s bark has often proved worse than his bite, the same could scarcely said of his Texan predecessor

An interesting companion piece to Stone’s film – the flipside to it, in fact – is David Leaf’s 2006 documentary The US vs John Lennon, which views the Nixon years through the lens of the counterculture: the Black Panthers, anti-Vietnam marches and the political awakening, such as it is, of Beatle John Lennon. Lennon, in love with New York and newly radicalised by friendships with Panther leader Bobby Seale and activist Abbie Hoffman, has one of his risible bed-ins with Yoko Ono – ‘Stay in bed! Grow your hair! Bed peace!’ – and announces to the world that ‘War is Over – if you want it,’ a slogan replicated on billboards worldwide. 

‘All we are saying,’ Lennon sings, ‘is GIVE PEACE A CHANCE,’ a chant taken up by folk musician Pete Seeger, performing to a huge crowd of anti-war protestors and shouting ‘Are you listening Nixon? Are you listening Agnew?’ They clearly are – Lennon’s quickly put under close surveillance and the authorities try to revoke his visa, with Nixon muttering darkly about the risks ‘somebody in showbusiness’ takes when he ‘comes and participates in a political rally.’ Though better-rounded viewers may find themselves pulled in both directions, Leaf’s documentary gives a riveting sense of the divisions still present in the country today – two sides who don’t want to hear, still less know one another – and a wound which stubbornly refuses to heal. 

Another presidential picture definitely worth a look is W – again from Oliver Stone, about George W. Bush and the Iraq invasion. While it’s hardly one of the director’s best films, W is rarely boring and brings into focus that foggiest and most forgotten of periods, the recent past. It’s also a reminder to the Left, in 2024, to put their hatreds into order. If Trump’s bark has often proved worse than his bite, the same could scarcely said of his Texan predecessor, who went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter on false pretences) and left hundreds of thousands dead.

Yet Stone, hardly a Republican, sees the 43rd president (played by Josh Brolin) as a well-meaning if rather dim man with excuses, overlooked by his father (POTUS 41) in favour of brother Jeb, and desperate for his approval. We get all the greatest hits here of the Dubya years – the president’s mangling of the English language (‘They misunderestimated me!’), Dick Cheney’s scary doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, the shifting variety of reasons for the Iraq invasion (Oil? Democracy? Dad issues?) and that queasy mixture, in the Bush administration, of Christianity and calculated violence. You’re left with a picture of a man too bluntly Manichean for words, who sees world events as a kind of Western. ‘There’s good and evil,’ he says of his crusade at one point. ‘And good ultimately wins out.’

Casting a little further back, to the Clinton years immediately preceding, viewers should catch D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary The War Room, about the Arkansas Governor’s triumphant election campaign in 1992, when he trounced Bush’s father for the White House. Clinton is the shadowiest of presences in this film, appearing only fleetingly, the documentary’s true star being James Carville, who ran his campaign. Carville – bald, gangly and frankly odd, the ‘raging Cajun’ – is a gift to the documentary-maker, a man who seems to twang with energy, clearly loves conflict and is so much larger than life, he almost capsizes the film. Amidst much humour (typical of the time) we get the nuts and bolts of a Presidential campaign: the mudslinging, the cavilling on minutiae, the adoring crowds, banners and brass bands. At one point, forcing himself to contemplate Clinton’s possible defeat, Carville improvises a comic cliche of a concession speech: ‘It is not whether we have lost this battle! It is whether we endure in a larger war!’ Carville’s colleagues fall about laughing, yet it’s worryingly close to Kamala’s speech on 6 November. Even in the War Room, sex scandals about Clinton are already on the rise, aides having to see off one ‘rumour’ after another. It’s going to be a choppy eight years.

This is a theme Mike Nichols’s movie Primary Colours, about a similar election campaign, picks up and runs with. ‘He’s poked his pecker into some sorry trashbins,’ says one character of Presidential contender Jack Stanton, a figure who, as played by John Travolta, is almost a shameless copy of Clinton himself. We get quite a generous take on the former President here: he’s a man who listens, feels your pain, is a fascinating mixture of cynicism and compassion, and who, even as he lies to you, looks you in the eye, grabs your arm and makes you feel vaguely honoured. At times he even comes close to greatness, were it not for the Achilles’ heel that reaches up to his groin. Sex scandals proliferate, there’s a convincing performance by Emma Thompson as Stanton’s betrayed wife (supposedly not modelled on Hilary, but who are they kidding?), and Primary Colors – a film of genuine good will, if at moments a little smug – is also a time-capsule of the 1990s. Bill Maher, Charlie Rose (RIP) and Larry King all appear as themselves, and there’s a genuine feeling of hope in the air. Democrats are led by someone eloquent and on-the-ball, who campaigns on matters like literacy, healthcare, the economy and jobs and is carried straight to power. Kamala’s disappointed followers should dry their eyes, stop pulling their hair out and, with notepads on their knees, watch this film like hawks.