Reviews/Film; 'The War Room': Behind the Scenes of Clinton's Campaign

"The War Room" was shown during the recent New York Film Festival. Following are excerpts from Janet Maslin's review, which appeared in The New York Times on Oct. 13. The film opens today at Film Forum 1, 209 West Houston Street, South Village, and is to run until Nov. 16.

Is any stone left unturned in a modern Presidential campaign? When every last whistle-stop and handshake is thoroughly documented, can there be anything more for a film maker to find? When D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus set out to chronicle the Clinton campaign, they were taking on a seemingly redundant task. And yet "The War Room," their glimpse of maneuvers by Clinton strategists, finds new facets of the story and manages to coax cliffhanging suspense out of a fait accompli.

Whatever "The War Room" reveals about how Mr. Clinton won the election, its real subject is why he won. The true focus of this watchful, frankly admiring film is the Clinton campaign staff, with James Carville and George Stephanopoulos receiving star billing. These tireless new-breed strategists, whose fast, aggressive tactics helped reshape their party's thinking, played a high-profile role in the election.

"The War Room" crystallizes both the idealism and the cunning that swept Mr. Clinton to victory. In the process, it looks right through the public masks and captures Mr. Carville and Mr. Stephanopoulos in their natural element, working the phones, conducting planning sessions and trading assessments of their man and his opponents.

An immediate question raised by "The War Room" is whether these two image-conscious individuals could ever have behaved naturally in the presence of a camera. The answer is self-evident as the film moves along, achieving moments of remarkable candor.

One of the film's more memorable glimpses finds Mr. Stephanopoulos talking down an 11th-hour blackmailer threatening to go public with gossip about the candidate's sexual peccadilloes. Mr. Stephanopoulos calmly moves from dismissal ("You would be laughed at") to flat-out threat ("I guarantee you that if you do this, you'll never work in Democratic politics again") to Godfatherese ("You'll know that you did the right thing, and you didn't dishonor yourself") without missing a beat.

"The War Room" watches as Mr. Carville and his fellow strategists leap gleefully at every opportunity and sweat out the terrible suspense. By Election Day, Mr. Carville and Mr. Stephanopoulos are un-self-conscious enough to allow the camera to watch them in their deserted War Room headquarters, wondering whether their hopes and labor will be worth anything at all. But as Mr. Carville puts it playfully at one point, "The harder you work, the luckier you are." "The War Room," a revealing film and an invaluable document, illustrates exactly what that means.