A kindred spirit to “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the new documentary “The Hunting of the President” is not about the current inhabitant of the White House, but his predecessor.
Based on a book by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, “The Hunting” lays out a case to confirm the existence of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Rodham Clinton famously mentioned. The objective of this conservative cabal? Kill Bill.
Or at least impeach him. The film, co-directed by a close Clinton friend and Hollywood producer, Harry Thomason, documents a series of attacks on Bill Clinton dating from before his presidency began. Morgan Freeman narrates.
One segment discusses a shadowy group that was apparently headquartered on a houseboat in Little Rock in 1992. Highlighted here is a bizarre menagerie of Arkansas bottom-feeders who were mixed up in these shenanigans. You half expect to see Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones wander through as their freaky “JFK” characters.
Thomason does a little better at describing how billionaire Richard Mellon-Scaife funded the “Arkansas Project,” a national organization that worked to discredit Clinton. Maybe Hillary wasn’t so far off with the word “conspiracy” after all.
While the movie acknowledges Clinton’s character flaws, like a tendency to have sex with women who were not his wife, it saves its wrath for the media and the presumed conspiracy.
This leads to some laughably one-sided sequences. The Gennifer Flowers story may well have been exposed and sensationalized by media scandalmongers and right-wing agents. But surely Clinton bears more responsibility than anyone else for his own extramarital affair.
“The Hunting” is much better when it gets to the Whitewater debacle, which takes up the majority of screen time. The film pulls no punches in describing the Whitewater investigation as an $80 million boondoggle, an attempt to nail the Clintons over a past real-estate/S&L failure by morphing into a study of the president’s sex life. (After many years, the investigation concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge the Clintons.)
The chief independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, is the villain of the piece. The film reminds us of the reasons Starr was not an unbiased choice for the job – but then this was part of the public record already, as is so much in “The Hunting.”
Thomason’s jazzing up the documentary with restaged scenes or stock footage is sometimes embarrassing. The one advantage the film offers is the chance to see the people themselves talking. Conservatives mostly declined to be interviewed, although Jerry Falwell daintily washes his hands of a scurrilous anti-Clinton TV series called “The Clinton Chronicles,” which he helped fund and televise.
The most memorable character here is Susan McDougal. With her manic-depressive husband Jim, she was involved in Whitewater, and served jail time (under what she describes as hideous circumstances) for refusing to testify. She flat-out states that the Starr investigation asked her to invent evidence against Clinton. There’s a story going on here that still hasn’t been properly delved into, and it deserves a truly independent investigator – someone other than Ken Starr or Harry Thomason.
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