The Candidate

Bill McKay is a public interest lawyer in California who stays away from politics. A campaign consultant comes to him: you are going to lose this Senate race anyway, so you can say whatever you like. McKay agrees and does exactly that. The polls start rising. As they rise, what he says gets shorter. The subject is not the election but the erosion of language. McKay's early speeches are detailed and uncomfortable; as the campaign proceeds the sentences shorten, the sharp parts fall away, and in the end only a few formulas remain. Nobody tells him to stop; he learns it himself. The form has a documentary texture: handheld camera, real rally footage, dialogue close to improvisation. Some scenes were shot inside actual political events. Jeremy Larner wrote the screenplay; he had been a speechwriter for a presidential candidate and the script comes directly from that experience. He won the Oscar for original screenplay for it. The closing line, the one question McKay asks his consultant after winning, became among the most quoted sentences in American political cinema. Michael Ritchie directs. Robert Redford plays McKay, Peter Boyle the consultant and Melvyn Douglas his father. Who it is for: viewers who like campaign films and seventies American realism. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a resolution; the film repairs nothing and deliberately leaves its ending hanging.