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Running Mates
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Made for Home Box Office, Running Mates is a topical romantic comedy with two able stars,
Diane Keaton and Ed Harris. It attempts to revisit the formula of the great Katharine
Hepburn/Spencer Tracy films of the 1940s and ‘50s: mixing up love and politics,
private and public life, and (above all) trying to imagine what a world run
equally by both men and women would be like.
Nearby efforts in this genre, like Goldie Hawn’s Protocol (1984), seriously lack the
savvy and imagination of the older classics. This one gains from its clever use
of George and Hilary Clinton as a contemporary reference point.
Keaton plays Aggie, a writer of children’s books – and
defiantly independent in her personal (and hitherto private) life. As the story
opens, Aggie is trying to help her mournful, ex-rock star brother, Chapman (a
sharp performance from Ed Begley, Jr.), get out of his obsessions with failed
love – he’s so far gone, he keeps playing Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful”
over and over at top volume (and this was just a year before its sublimely
redemptive use in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way).
When Aggie finds herself falling for Presidential
candidate Hugh Hathaway (Harris), she resists the feelings of “abject devotion”
welling up inside her. Furthermore, she refuses to play the role of obedient,
quiet, supportive fiancé for the media. As well, Aggie has some specific ideas
about the kinds of issues that the predominantly male world of politics invariably
overlooks …
The plot hangs on a dirty trick pulled at the height
of the campaign by a slimy journalist, Frank (Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story [1961] and Twin Peaks [1990-1991, 2017] fame), who owns a copy of a “little art film” on which Aggie
collaborated during the revolutionary ‘60s. This mocked-up bit of radical,
experimental cinema is alone worth the price of hire.
How do director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (maker of the
Beatles documentary Let It Be [1970]
and long rumoured to be Orson Welles’ son, although
the evidence is inconclusive) and writer A.L. Appling (pseudonym for Carole
Eastman of Five Easy Pieces [1970]
fame – she returned to this turf, again alongside Bob Rafeslon,
in Man Trouble [1992]) manoeuvre a resolution from there? Their solution may not
satisfy many lovers of the classic romantic comedies.
However spotty, Running Mates is nonetheless engaging entertainment. And somebody better save that prime avant-garde pastiche for a fab, anthological, audiovisual compilation, perhaps along these lines … MORE Lindsay-Hogg: Frankie Starlight © Adrian Martin
June 1993
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