Robert Redford had a knack for making every role seem like the one he was born to play. But the most fitting of all, by my lights, was his turn as Bill McKay in “The Candidate,” the 1972 satirical comedy that is perhaps the greatest film about modern American campaigning ever made.
McKay is a public interest lawyer, the liberal son of a popular former California governor, who is drafted by a political consultant to run against an incumbent Republican senator. Since everyone assumes McKay has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning — including, most importantly, McKay — he reluctantly agrees to run purely in order to have a public platform to speak about his views on caring for the underprivileged and the environment.
But a funny thing happens on the way to election night: It turns out this handsome, charismatic candidate is very appealing, especially on TV. And as his poll numbers edge up, his advisers begin to push his message toward generalities, sanding off his principles, finding ways to do an end-run around moments when his conscience on matters like race and poverty gets the better of him. In the process, his principled identity begins to disappear behind his image, too.
And it works. He wins. Sitting stunned in a hotel room, away from the media throng, he turns to his manager and delivers a now-famous line: “What do we do now?”
Redford hatched the idea for the movie with the film’s director, Michael Ritchie, which makes sense: The legacy of the actor and filmmaker, who died Tuesday at 89, is wrapped up with both his activism and his mixed feelings about the role of politicians in changing the world. His views never fell along neat lines, though he tended leftward. He was known for supporting environmental causes as well as Indigenous and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He endorsed Barack Obama’s re-election and Joe Biden’s candidacy, and criticized Donald Trump’s policies and “moral compass.” But he supported both Republican and Democratic candidates during his lifetime.
Yet as “The Candidate” reveals, Redford was skeptical that the political process, at least in the American two-party system, was conducive to real change. The movie could come off as cynical, but some five decades after its release, it rings more with realism, because it pinpointed something very particular about modern campaigning: it works with the same visual vocabulary as our entertainment.
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The post As an Activist, Robert Redford Understood the Power of Celebrity appeared first on New York Times.
