We choose, we are chosen. How often doesn't match. Among the most ancient professions there are those to which all sorts of (high) moral imperatives are not applicable absolutely because of the invariable categorical uncorrelatedness with their true essence of God-sellers, garbagemen and scoundrels. The soul of the Devil, of course, they did not sell, they did not mortgage themselves, because they themselves often have to try on the role of a great tempter, and the lower the threshold of their own conscience, the higher the limits of the notorious vices, which they do not conceal in themselves, and in others awaken with obvious success. Bankers, insurers, marketers, journalists, political scientists... A good, honest journalist is a mostly dead journalist, despite all the awards of the Pulitzer type, for the life of those servants of the fifth power who do not serve the authorities is short. In turn, a real PR and political scientist is one who does not shun any methods to achieve his main goal - the creation of an ideal politician; the highest art of lies, betrayal, manipulation and propaganda, in the aggregate from no one creating a future ruler of the Duma and the treasury.
Pete St. John, a well-respected political consultant with considerable administrative resources at hand, agrees to take a direct part in the election campaign of Ohio businessman Jerome Cade, who is pushed up by certain oligarchic circles. Surrounded by the future senator, a poisonous snake is actively curling one Arnold Billings, a risky and brazen PR man who began an active campaign against St. John after a while. Against the background of this conflict, Cade himself pales - overly reflective, as for the future politician.
It is not the first time for Sidney Lumet to surgically open the rotting, bleeding sores of the state life support system, while choosing as the main characters fighting against this slimy leviathan, loners, outcasts or too ambiguous characters who often walked on the other side of the street. Such are Serpico from the film of the same name, the rebel robbers from Dog Noon, Howard Beeley from Television or Frank Galvin from The Verdict, but not at all, no matter how much the director himself, Pete St. John, the hero of Richard Gere from the political drama Power in 1985, tried to make it cleaner and whiter. The dramatic conflict between conditionally good and conditionally bad characters in this picture is leveled by the most inert essence of the behind-the-scenes show from the inside, where holy ideals and principles are possible only in the case of some political suicide, but in fact, none of the characters of the tape will consciously do this completely, because their skin is too expensive, their shelter is too cozy, their fall is too low. . . Therefore, St. John’s sudden insight is perceived as nothing more than an author’s blunder against the background of sharp-critical developments towards both Republicans and Democrats, between whom Lumet put a sign of real equality. However, such a somewhat syllogistically idealistic image of the elusive protagonist Pete is seen as a consequence of the dampness of the debut script by David Himmelsteen, on the frankly didactic essence of which Lumet habitually grew his own dialectical flesh, to the end of the tape parting with any pretended illusion of the world of the powerful.
Pete St. John is to some extent perceived as the biggest hypocrite among the rest of the cloaca. He cannot be called either an idealist, since they do not live long and certainly do not survive in the political shark beau monde, and all his ideological character is rather the character of the notorious image coloring, or even more a realist, because having power, it is easier to create reality around yourself, knowing initially a little more than the ordinary John Smith or Doe. Pete is not from the breed of fugitives, but he is from the type of conformists, who nevertheless have a weak conscience, an understanding of the inevitability of punishment for indirect participation in certain crimes. But Pete is not as honest with himself as his counterpart Billings, a little more than fully using in his arsenal of influence wolf laws, replaced by him with some ten commandments or constitutional rights. If Pete St. John prefers to balance on the boundary between total brutality and feigned devotion to moralism, then Billings is straightforward in his obvious vileness, and in the context of the fact that they both serve the interests of the same candidate, their increasingly threatening conflict of worldviews is perceived symbolically not as a struggle of an angel with a demon, but as a confrontation of lesser evil with a greater, even though the director resorts to postulating a trivial dichotomy Black and White (in the role of the antisocial PR man Arnzel Washington we see). Pete St. John has internal moral barriers, and he can only cross them as a last resort, while Arnold Billings is unquestionably a mirror image of his masters, and Pete runs from this obvious reflection, sincerely assuming that this is the only way he will be saved before it is too late. Only this attempt of his moral salvation seems a deliberate escape from the impending exposure, because this time the amateurs rule the ball, Watergate cosplay in oblique and transverse.
However, the celebration of splendor is not worth waiting for; Lumet is not inclined to follow the tricks-22 of those in power, according to the Hamburg account, deciding the final in the spirit of inefficiency, ellipsis, and in the end inviting the viewer to the scaffold of so-called democracy, which seems more a complete fiction than reality. By the end, the characters of the film turn into functions of the author’s defamatory statement against everyone, because the authorities inevitably prevail even over the most honest natures. The more you want to live than to die for some revanchist idea, becoming not so much an enemy of the people, but of yourself that so foolishly succumbed to the emotions of the lowest order.