E-Mail This Article to a Friend Requiem for a candidate, continued
	Related Links Inside the Bubble The film’s official Web site. Includes footage of several TV appearances by director Steve Rosenbaum. Inside Inside the Bubble A critical take by John Dickerson, Slate’s chief political correspondent. The Unofficial John Kerry Blog Back-and-forth on the film from the Democratic segment of the blogosphere.

Except that that’s not the whole story. As FactCheck.org reported later, back in 2003, Bush identified himself as a part owner of LSTF, a company that produces trees for commercial sale. Hillary’s eye-roll notwithstanding, Kerry didn’t fuck up here. Instead, Bush dodged a valid criticism by slipping into his faux-everyman persona, something the president has always done maddeningly well. Inside the Bubble should make this clear. But it doesn’t.

All that said, the film is stronger and more engaging than its harshest detractors would suggest. To begin with, it drives home the grim realities of high-level campaign work — the anxiety, the monotony, the claustrophobia, the exhaustion — in an unexpectedly visceral way. The three main characters, Loftus, Morehouse, and Nicholson, have radically different temperaments: Loftus is voluble, Morehouse is an even-keeled family man, Nicholson is a joker with a dry sense of humor. But by the end of the film, we see each of them pushed to their physical and psychological limits.

More significantly, the film occasionally humanizes Kerry, and even casts him in a noble light. With the jockeying for ’08 already under way in earnest, it’s hard to find anyone excited by the prospect of a second Kerry run. The right candidate could have beaten Bush, or so the thinking goes, and Kerry simply wasn’t the right candidate. As a corollary to this point of view, there’s plenty of lingering anti-Kerry resentment. Why did you wait so long to fight back against the Swift Boat Veterans? Why, even after it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, did you say that had you known that at the time you still would have voted for the war? And why did you wear that stupid barn jacket?

So it’s a bit of a surprise to see Kerry emerge — to the extent he emerges at all in Inside the Bubble — as a genuinely likable figure. Again, the lack of interviews with Kerry is a huge hole in the film, but when we do see Kerry, he’s usually behaving winningly. Three days before the election, Kerry talks with Cutter, his press secretary, about the number of Senate bills he’s been credited with passing. Kerry seems to think the Globe is selling him short, and he wants her to rectify the situation. This shot, too, has been much discussed, in large part because Kerry’s Senate record was MIA for essentially all of the campaign. But the most striking aspect of this exchange is Kerry’s gentleness: the candidate can’t afford any last-minute gaffes, but he makes his point quietly and respectfully.

In yet another scene, Kerry sits in a locker room at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, waiting to do a satellite interview that’s plagued with technical difficulties. At one point, he talks to himself in Italian; at another, he jokes about the stench in the room. But what really stands out in this particular shot is the loneliness of the candidate. Kerry blinks into the klieg lights, laboring to amuse himself and his handlers and then switching into full interview mode (complete with full interview smile) as soon as the satellite connection is made. Along the way, we can see the fatigue set in, both emotional and physical. And we feel an unexpected surge of sympathy for this talented, accomplished, infuriatingly self-destructive man, who came so close to delivering us from Bush but who couldn’t get the job done. For that alone, Rosenbaum deserves a great deal of credit.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com.