Death of a President
The film so controversial that it couldn’t release in U.S. theatres is now available on DVD on April 3, 2007. If you didn’t hear about it, Death of a President styles itself as a documentary about the 10/19/07 assassination of current president George W. Bush. It’s a provocative choice of subject matter no matter what your politics – to imagine aloud the death of a real, living public figure and present it as a past event takes huge, radioactive balls. We must applaud the filmmakers their cojones for making the attempt at all in these divisive times.
Is it wish fulfillment or a horror movie for you? It doesn’t matter. Balls aside, is the movie any good. I can sincerely say yes. It is masterfully put together, with terrific editing between fictional footage of the story’s characters and real footage of Bush and his major players. For example, a scene of Bush disembarking from an airplane is archive footage we’ve seen a million times: out on the steps of Air Force One, it’s definitely him. Cuts to press corps, real security guys, and the actors positioned perfectly in the scene are done so well that (with only one jarring visual exception), we can’t tell who is cast and who is staff. It gives the movie the reality it needs to sell itself as a documentary.
It is a bold and frankly brilliant choice to use a real, sitting president (especially one about whom no one can disagree that emotions run high), rather than Martin Sheen or some unknown white guy. It instantly humanizes the participants and provides context for the protesters’ hatred, the supporters’ grief, the fever of the suspects, and the shock of the country. We can’t spend time getting to know and love/vilify some fake president with a couple of Hollywood speeches just so we have an emotional opinion when he gets killed. Death of a President can get right in there and analyze what went wrong and how, and where the investigation took everyone. It takes everyone’s feelings (pro and con) about Bush 43 and gets into the interesting nitty gritty of “what happened next?”
The interviewees for the documentary are terrific actors, well cast and directed realistically. The film looks and feels like a very well-assembled documentary, pacing stock, security, and interview footage just right, and spooling out the story just right. If you awoke someone from cryogenic storage and showed them this film as if it were truth (save that one sloppy composite shot), they would surely not be able to tell it were fiction.
OK, so, it’s got balls and technical skills, but is it anything more than a stunt? Yes, yes it is. The whole film is a very astute analysis of the fallout of such an event. You can probably predict what (gulp) President Cheney would enact into law after such a monstrous breach in security. You can imagine which groups would be profiled as obvious suspects, what tools would be used in the investigation. It’s a fictional snapshot of an imagined future that really is a Polaroid of our immediate present, and an all around triumph of filmmaking. However you feel about our president, you must appreciate the craft of this film.
MPAA Rating R-brief, violent images
Release date 10/27/06 (dvd 4/3/07)
Time in minutes 93
Director Gabriel Range
Studio Lionsgate/Newmarket
