War Room

Year: 1993

Grade: A-

Country: USA

Director: Hegedus/Pennebaker

Review

anytime you can get this close to a public official you’re in historical territory. “crisis” and “primary” both followed JFK, one during the democratic primaries (i’ll let you guess which one) and the other followed him while he was actually a sitting president (a documentary first, and as far as i know, only). both those films, though, run at just under an hour. war room is a feature length film that follows bill clinton’s campaign in 1992 to oust george h.w. bush. the film could have easily been twice as long and i would have eaten up every bit of it because this stuff is endlessly interesting to me; i’ve seen the film a few times now and it never gets old. pennebaker and hegedus are the directors of the film and they’re both veterans of documentary cinema, to varying degrees. pennebaker made the classic bob dylan film “don’t look back,” and hegedus went on to make “startup.com” which i enjoyed even more than the dylan film. i talk a lot about films as historical documents and that’s naturally even more true for documentaries (duh). but this film goes beyond that generalization of films as documentation of a social/political pulse, and it does that because, like startup.com, it was in a very interesting and important place at the right time. it probably won’t be anytime soon that we get this candid a look at the inside of a winning national campaign – how it thinks, how it functions, how it responds, what drives it, etc. if you’re at all interested in politics this a vital film.