The road to the White House is paved with personal pitfalls - ask Southern dark horse contender Governor Jack Stanton (John Travolta), his long-suffering wife Susan (Emma Thompson), their campaign adviser Henry (Adrian Lester) or even their short and balding media manager Richard (Billy Bob Thornton).
There are the ubiquitous Governor's Girls - Women with Big Hair - including a possibly pregnant black teenager. And there is the question America has asked itself of late: what exactly goes on in the 'Oral' Office and how much does it all matter? Welcome to the world of - no, not Bill and Hillary Clinton - but Primary Colors, the Hollywood adaptation of the much-talked-about novel by Anonymous, who later turned out to be Newsweek columnist Joe Klein. An eerily accurate depiction of a supposedly fictitious and bewilderingly amoral Southern couple on their way to the White House, the book kicked off a media feeding frenzy. Now the film has hit theatres just as the latest Clinton follies are played out.
There is, director Mike Nichols admits, absolutely no point in pretending the Stantons of Primary Colors are not in some way related to the Clintons. 'It's delicate and complicated because of course they're like the Clintons - it would be stupid to pretend that they're not,' he says. 'But they're only like them. They're not them. Which also leaves us free, like the book, to simply go off into fiction - into things that have not happened at all.' But Primary Colors starts off from a base we are all familiar with and includes characters who need no introduction. Of course John Travolta is Jack Stanton who is Bill Clinton and of course Emma is Susan is Hillary, but Richard is Billy Bob by way of James Carville, while Adrian Lester plays Henry as a black George Stephanopolous. You know these people. This is insider politics.
But as with the book - an entertainingly cynical look at the price of power - Primary Colors also begs the question: what is the point in making a movie about a president who sleeps with a hairdresser? Who cares? Responds Nichols: 'It's about honour. Where is honour now that the world has come to the point where we find it? Has honour been redefined - can honour be redefined? What do we do, because we can't live without honour.' Adds Emma Thompson: 'Primary Colors is a big love story for me. Not only for my character, Susan, with Jack - I think she adores him. But there's a great love of politics, of the game.
'I think one of the biggest questions raised by this film is what do we expect our politicians to be made from? How we expect people to be decent if they haven't made terrible mistakes, that's one question. These mistakes produce the man. The next question is, do you really believe that powerful people or people who want that kind of power are not going to be floored in some way or another? 'The political journey, it seems to me, does require at some point along the way a sacrifice in personal integrity, if only for a moment, to maintain the structure of the bigger goal. I don't honestly see how you're going to avoid that.' But both Nichols and Thompson fail to point out that - as with Mr Clinton himself - Jack Stanton's 'sacrifice in integrity' is both entirely voluntary and in no way changes the 'bigger goal'. It just satisfies his libido.
The question for the viewing public (at the cinema and of CNN) is: are those slips indicative of a poor leader; and, is the 'bigger goal' worth it? In Primary Colors, Jack Stanton is presented as an idealistic man of the people, a person who would overhaul the system (in particular education, healthcare and gun control) if he gained power and who is personally incredibly magnetic.