Any work that throws Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity into conniptions based entirely on a one-sentence description of its premise is worth paying at least some attention to. The new faux documentary Death of a President, which depicts the imagined 2007 assassination of George W. Bush, is certainly no exception. Knee-jerk demagoguery is the expected reaction to provocative art from conservative firebrands like Hannity and Limbaugh, but in this case such a response has not been isolated to the right -- even Hillary Clinton felt compelled to distance herself from the movie, saying that any attempt “to profit on such a scenario makes me sick.” More impressively, Robert Reich practically twisted himself into a pretzel trying to reconcile his professed stalwart support of the first amendment with his revulsion at the film's subject matter. It's worth noting that none of these people had actually seen the film at the time of their various pronouncements.
If they had, chances are they could have saved some hot air. For Death of a President is a rather humdrum thriller that packs all its provocation and resonance into its premise -- remove George W. Bush from the proceedings, and what's left is a staid, CourtTV-like documentary that fails to say much incendiary or enlightening about the forces that Bush's death might actually unleash.
As virtually all the critics who have seen the film have noted, the assassination in Death of a President is hardly an act of incitement. If anything, director and co-writer Gabriel Range goes out of his way to suggest that killing George W. Bush would bring nothing but bad news to the president's friends and enemies alike. In talking-head testimony from fake White House officials, Bush is portrayed as a confident, steadfast man of the people. It is his assassination that leads the country down a path of heightened antagonisms with Syria and the further curtailing of civil liberties (in the form of a robust expansion of the PATRIOT Act).
As a showcase of technical cinematic skills, Death of a President is quite inventive. Using real scenes from anti-war protests in Chicago -- the site of the shooting -- Range seamlessly incorporates news footage of the president into the fictional setting of the assassination. The seams show in a few moments -- including during Dick Cheney's eulogy for the fallen president, which is taken from the vice president's speech at Ronald Reagan's funeral -- but the overall effect is generally convincing and creepy-cool. At any rate, given that Range and his producers were not working with studio-financed special effects, they can be forgiven if the film occasionally betrays middling production values. Where they deserve less leniency is in crafting a narrative that isn't worthy of their cinematic ambitions.
Death of a President wants to use the presidential assassination to illustrate the degree to which national tragedy will continue to provide ready opportunities for political exploitation at the hands of the men and women who really pull the strings in the current administration (particularly Cheney). To those ends, the film lays out a narrative in which one of the suspects, a Syrian native who was in the vicinity at the time of the assassination, is accused and convicted despite flimsy evidence. The investigation and trial not only remind us of the trumped-up terrorism cases we've seen hyped and botched by Bush's Justice Department in the last few years or the kangaroo courts currently trying Guantanamo Bay detainees; it also sets off resonant echoes of the rush to war in Iraq and the administration's congenital disinterest in hearing inconvenient evidence or arguments.
Unfortunately, Range seems reluctant to push such implications very far or to dwell on the likely national and geopolitical ramifications of such an explosive event. Instead, Death of a President is generally content to remain a micro-examination of one man's killing. And that killing, as it is laid out in the film, is not all that interesting. After hinting at looming war with Syria and briskly documenting further expansions of executive branch powers, Death of a President devotes its last 30 minutes to determining the identity and motivations of the real killer, a storyline that gets tedious very quickly. It's both a disappointment and a testament to the film's fundamentally non-radical outlook that, having killed the president, Range and his co-conspirators never think to leave the scene of the crime.
What limited political commentary exists in the film isn't particularly fresh or insightful -- a curtailing of civil liberties following a presidential assassination certainly seems likely in the current political environment, but it doesn't take a 90 minute film to get that point across. The prospect of Dick Cheney ascending to the presidency in the context of a politically charged national crisis raises a seemingly bottomless specter of dark possibilities, but the film largely demurs from exploring them. For all the whining we've heard from the Hannitys and Limbaughs of the world about this film, it left me yearning for a movie that would have really given them something to cry about.
Sudhir Muralidhar is a writer living in New York.
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