The War Room

But the focus is way too far over on the side of personalities. There's scant political revelation: it's less behind-the-scenes than the scenes from a different perspective. Read full review

An entertaining if humdrum 1993 documentary...Seeing the actual deliberations behind image making has a certain built-in interest, but I expected more surprises. Read full review

Still, the film's limitations are serious. Pennebaker and Hegedus did not begin their film until Clinton was already nominated, missing out on the big stories of the primary season: Gennifer Flowers, the draft flap and Clinton's knock- down, drag-out with Jerry Brown in the New York primary...With mixed results Pennebaker and Hegedus attempt to sketch in what's missing via unused news footage and out-takes from ''Feed,'' the Kevin Rafferty-James Ridgeway film about the New Hampshire primary. In one example that I picked up on, Pennebaker and Hegedus juggle the time sequence, giving the impression that a scene of Clinton hanging out in a hotel with his handlers in New York occurred in New Hampshire. [30 Dec 1993, p.E1]

While hardly the sensation its hype promises, the D.A. PennebakerChris Hegedus documentary The War Room offers some droll glimpses behind the scenes at the workings of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and its twin masterminds, Cajun firebrand James Carville and cucumber-cool George Stephanopoulos. [4 Feb 1994, p.L26]

The film feels as if it has a huge gap in it and the name of the gap is Bill Clinton. Who is this man who would be, and became, president? The film has no idea; Clinton himself is glimpsed occasionally, a completely charming fellow who can handle a press conference superbly, but who somehow is never there. As Carl Cannon wrote in The Sun's Sunday Perspective section, "It's as basic as this: Can his word be trusted?" The movie never bothers to confront such an issue or even, really, to acknowledge it; in documenting the Democrats, it clearly comes to share their uncritical view of the Hamlet-Bubba who carries their standard...Like the campaign itself, then, it's far too tightly wound up in details to examine a larger picture, which in the end may be the problem. [18 Feb 1994]