Death of a President
Directed by Gabriel Range
“Dead.” “Dead.” “Dead.” A staccato montage of numerous TV news programs announces the fictionalized assassination of President George W. Bush in Death of a President. It updates Hollywood’s old multi-lingual newspaper-headline montages; the kind Preston Struges hilariously satirized in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. But nothing in Death of a President is good-natured. Instead, that steady drumbeat of bad news is meant to satisfy a new partisan bloodlust. It may be the ugliest movie moment ever presented to a rational public. When Fipresci (The International Federation of Film Critics) gave a prize to Death of the President at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, citing “the audacity with which it distorts reality,” it was a film journalism catastrophe.
We have reached a terrible point in cultural discourse when American political disagreements are exercised through the wish for a politician’s death. And make no mistake; Death of a President is, indeed, wishful thinking. It has been made on the rising tide of Iraq war disgruntlement and partisan hysteria. The Left’s certainty of its own righteousness—its anger, frustration and resentment—here, gets turned into limitless malevolence. Those dissidents who could even conceive the grim wish for Bush to die would likely silence anyone who disagreed with their position—and in the most fascistic way possible.
This movie doesn’t work as storytelling. Deviously set in 2007 Chicago (to echo the 1968 Democratic Convention riots that led to the trial of the Chicago Six), it imagines a point when anti-Iraq war protestors have grown even more hostile. Its gruesome form of speculative fiction appeals to weak political “argufiers,” recalling the lethal intransigence that led to The Terror during the French Revolution. British director Gabriel Range employs the pseudo-documentary format with its popular but ruinous disregard of truth. While his immoral narrative uses a cagey device, presuming to “report” on how masses of protestors vent their anger, how the Secret Service slips up and how bad social events spiral downward, it’s really just a form of elitist propaganda.
Range’s pop-doc offers a scenario that some media pundits wish they could report—the kind of thing Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” might offer for snarky gallows humor. But then, Range turns around and attempts to make it plausible. He interviews actors portraying Secret Service men, FBI agents, a Presidential speech writer and a few angry or sorrowful dissidents (who portray the suspected assassins). This technique is as shoddy as in Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo; Range’s queasy, untrustworthy mix of true and false footage dangerously distorts history and devalues the journalistic aspect of movie aesthetics. The film’s best scene is a long, sustained shot of Bush delivering a speech. You get to hear “room tone”—the aural aura of the event has the weight of realism (plus awe and respect). TV news clips never provide room tone, just noise because it obfuscates reality. Too bad Range abandons existential information for bias.
Britain’s advertising mills graduate aces at visual fakery like Range, Winterbottom and Paul Greengrass, but their visual sleight of hand does damage to audiences’ perception. Footage of Bush being shot is short and sly. (Range lacks the guts to show blood and guts—he makes a laughable pretense of “taste.”) Avoiding the trendy, fatuous idea of “truthiness,” Range emphasizes medianess. That repetitive pronouncement of Bush’s death is such a reportorial convention that it doesn’t cause us to imagine the horror of political assassination, just to use our long-conditioned media-watcher’s reflex. It calls for no feeling; the events leading up to and following Bush’s killing are made easy to swallow. Range’s gimmick is, in fact, viciously inhumane.
Using political speculation this way teaches viewers not to think or feel. Bush’s death itself is passed over, it means nothing. (As suggested in Shortbus, Range’s generation doesn’t know the anguish of assassination. That’s why it can accept this movie’s obscenity as mere rhetoric.) As Range depicts it, the country doesn’t respond in grief or shock. When an interviewee says, “We saw over 10,000 protestors display open hatred for the President,” Range appears to approve rather than critique the way an aggrieved polity becomes a bloodthirsty mob. Range even sympathizes with the assassin’s motive. In this typical Leftist sop, a character named Al Claybon, described as a “black, male Cindy Sheehan,” is used as a scapegoat. But contriving a case where a black man commits political violence doesn’t prove a black man has a legitimate beef against the American system—only, as usual, against Hollywood.
Range has a character defend Claybon’s actions as a bereaved father’s revenge: “There is no honor in dying for an immoral cause or lies.” But soldiers die for their country, for obediently defending the Constitution and its mandates; there is honor in their sacrifice and faith. Denying that is a weapon of mass destruction. Death of a President is vile.
