Politics Is Perception

The things you respond to in life change. This is inevitable. It should be, at the very least. Maybe I was sort of a political junkie long ago, but by a certain point it just started to make me too ill to keep paying attention to all that. And for a long time now it’s been getting worse, more depressing, more terrifying. I’d rather focus on better things in life like films but that gets difficult, especially these days. I also have zero desire to revisit THE WEST WING right now and the very idea seems too upsetting to me even if I was once a huge fan of the show (and SPORTS NIGHT too), at least the first four seasons. Which made me an Aaron Sorkin fan, I suppose. Maybe I responded to all the wit and idealism, maybe I always hoped that if I ever ran into him somewhere we could compare notes on being from Scarsdale or something. And forgetting that I have decidedly mixed feelings about what he’s done in the years since (THE SOCIAL NETWORK may be one of the best films of the 21st century but that doesn’t mean I don’t have further thoughts on the matter) something about THE WEST WING makes me feel a little uneasy now. Though I can remember being attracted to the very idea of the show focused on the supposed glorious tradition of the U.S. political system, shining a light on the people trying to make things better along with a politeness that was never really there and certainly isn’t now, too much of it doesn’t feel right anymore. Maybe it just reminds me too much of the real world instead of getting me to forget.

The seeds of THE WEST WING were of course planted in the screenplay Sorkin wrote several years earlier for the film that was Rob Reiner’s THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, released in November 1995 on the same day as GOLDENEYE, and thinking about all this recently led to thoughts about the utter horror of what happened to Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. I don’t want to talk about that but of course it all led me to further thoughts of Reiner and his career. It led me to thoughts of what he believed in. And it led me to thoughts of how people reacted to what happened to this man who I never knew, who I only saw once at a movie long ago and another time at a Dodgers game but had been a presence in the world for me almost as long as I can remember, moving from TV stardom to a director of films that included one of the funniest ever made (THIS IS SPINAL TAP) along with one of the most endearing romantic comedies ever made (WHEN HARRY MET SALLY). In addition to his directorial work that followed there was his political activism as well as continuing to play numerous roles in other people’s films that seemed to be almost for the sheer pleasure of just doing it. THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT was Reiner’s follow up to the critical and commercial disaster of NORTH the previous year and everything about it felt like a film designed to be a huge crowd pleaser, to make $100 million along with receiving multiple Oscar nominations. In the end the film made “only” $60 million domestically, not a flop but not a smash either, then got just a single Oscar nomination, for Marc Shaiman’s score. When Rob Reiner turned up for a cameo in friend Albert Brooks’ THE MUSE a few years later to thank Sharon Stone’s title character for the film, the moment seemed a little disingenuous. Returning to the film now in addition to all the feelings it brings up about the way the world has gone in real life since then, it feels like an attempt by the director at a pitch right down the middle which maybe ended up just a bit outside, the desire to say something about the political world fused with the ambition of a Capraesque romantic comedy perhaps undercut by the abrasiveness to the story. The very particular rhythms to the Aaron Sorkin dialogue, meanwhile, feel like they wound up being perfected in those TV shows a few years later and here is all still being worked on. Conceptually, THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT might be as close to a perfect screenplay as anything that came out in 1995 but in practice my feelings about the actual film are a little more complicated.

President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas), a widower and father of a teenage girl, is celebrating the release of a new poll that places him with a 63% favorable rating and has hopes to pass a crime bill off the strength of those numbers when he meets Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening), an environmental lobbyist working for a firm that looks to pass a radical new fossil fuel package to reduce carbon emissions. Instantly smitten, Shepherd asks her to be his date at a state dinner for the French President where in full view of everyone they dance and their romance begins. As this happens and they get to know each other better, Senator Robert Rumsen (Richard Dreyfuss) of the opposing party and looking to run for President himself, begins to step up his attacks based on that relationship but even as the poll numbers dip, Shepherd refuses to comment to the press on the relationship. But as the bills they are working on begin to falter and Rumsen’s attacks become personal, the President soon realizes he not only might lose those bills he may be losing the woman he’s fallen in love with.

Almost everyone seems like they’re in a good mood through much of THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT. And why shouldn’t they be? It’s the nineties. Things are looking up. There’s a bright future ahead. The Monica Lewinsky scandal hasn’t happened yet. Fox News was still a year away from going on the air. The bad guys are, in theory, not anything to get too worked up over for very long. The people in this film have jobs where they get to exchange witty banter with co-workers and if they fight through the day’s troubles hard enough it can all turn out ok. In the end, isn’t that what it’s all about? The films directed by Rob Reiner were often about their subject and little else, like how WHEN HARRY MET SALLY focuses almost entirely on the character’s relationships and nobody talks about their job for very long. A FEW GOOD MEN, written by Sorkin, is pretty much the opposite in the way it keeps the focus on their jobs and the court case of the film all the way through, no romance or anything else between Tom Cruise and Demi Moore to distract us. THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT, meanwhile, is about the inevitability of mixing the personal with the professional, how there is no avoiding that and maybe combining the two is the only way a person can be who they really are.

However much the film is the closest Rob Reiner ever came to making a full-on statement about the world we live in, it’s certainly an idealized fantasy of how government works, or possibly how he thinks it should work, or wishes it could work. But looking at it now, the idea of a functioning administration filled with decent people trying to get the job done while the opposition party plots all the horrible ways to do them may not have entirely been a fantasy in 1995 but it was close, just as much of a fantasy now as a news day where you don’t hear anything about the President at all. What this Hollywood look at the office provides is the belief that people coming together to make the world work really do exist and the right decisions can be made, where a retaliatory strike after an attack in the middle east is merely a necessary evil of the job. It’s part of the Sorkin thing how much the characters enjoy the tradition to it all, to never call the president anything but “Mr. President”, and if the right answers are figured out, if the right words are used to make the argument, maybe this is all that’s needed. It’s a nice thought. But it still is a fantasy which means that when real issues are brought up there’s no real place for depth to what’s being discussed, not as much as the film would like.

There’s a smoothness to it all in the way the film moves from one scene to the next and Reiner’s direction is all about the way characters relate to each other in every scene, in close-ups, in two shots, facing each other in framing that takes care of the interpersonal relationships, giving us a big closeup of Michael Douglas when he knows that he’s just met someone special. Reiner rarely goes for sweeping camera movement and it feels like there’s barely a shot that isn’t at eye level but it’s always engaging and, expertly shot by John Seale, looks like the glossy widescreen Hollywood movie it clearly wants to be. Unless I’m mistaken, this film and A FEW GOOD MEN are the only ones that Rob Reiner ever shot in ‘Scope and those two are the ones that feel like they’re striving to be big, splashy, old fashioned Hollywood movie star movies more than any of the others. The film believes in that sort of tradition, as evidenced from the opening credits over Marc Shaiman’s syrupy main theme that speaks to such nobility of the past that has lasted through the years but it’s also the Hollywood tradition it wants to be a part of, the way Sydney Wade talks about the Capraesque experience she wants to have in the White House or even just the Hepburn-Tracy ADAM’S RIB clip seen on a TV.

The flow of Sorkin’s dialogue and scene structure are familiar now from all the TV work so right from the start that dialogue offers a comfort to each line, the way just about the first thing the President says is telling someone, “We need to schedule more events where somebody gives me a really big fish” and the pieces of the plotting all fit together in a way that feels like Aaron Sorkin studied very carefully under the tutelage of how William Goldman did these things. Like much Sorkin dialogue it’s about the cadence of the words flowing together as much as what is literally being said with a few names that would later turn up on THE WEST WING as would snatches of recognizable dialogue like asking about ‘the virtue of a proportional response’. A few other lines are also very much a part of the battles of the nineties with much talk of family values along with a mention of liberal bias in the press and though the reporters in the press room are briefly chastised for asking about when Sydney had dinner at the White House instead of the crisis at hand, the media gladly seems to keep chasing the story to become the ‘unwilling accomplice’ the other side cynically considers them to be. These days in the real world it feels arguable if the ‘unwilling’ part of that even applies, if it even ever did, and certainly the press in the film gives Bob Rumsen the chance to make all the baseless accusations about Sydney that he wants. The take on the media as presented seems to be lightly ambivalent at best and maybe portraying them as an accessory at worst but it feels like Reiner/Sorkin don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, simply portraying them as a necessary evil for whichever side to get their message out there.

The film still wants to be about the optimism found in the President and Sydney falling for each other as well as all the people at the White House working together and verbally sparring with each other, the arguments over ‘fight the fights that we can win’ and the ‘ones that need fighting’. There’s a wistful feeling that comes from looking at all this now, fighting for the environment and against the gun lobby, thinking about how all those years ago it felt like there was a shot at getting some of these things taken care of but instead of really getting to the heart of these matters the film spends time negotiating on where the votes are going to go and seems to feel at times like the characters have nothing to argue about but the President’s poll numbers going down. Maybe the problem is the more lighthearted dialogue with such a Sorkin flavor is what sticks and the more serious stuff doesn’t quite have the same punch, missing the sort of depth to its arguing about ideals that Sorkin seemed to get better at a few years later a few seasons into THE WEST WING. If that show came out of wanting to do more with those supporting characters, it’s hard not to think that at roughly 113 minutes a few more to spend time on those subjects and how these people get their job done wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world. The plotting is tight enough that it feels like it could use some breathing room, maybe a few extra beats with the President’s daughter who seems forgotten near the end or the staff members to make it all that much richer. The pieces of the plot go together in a smart way, but it almost feels like a few scenes are missing before it quickly jumps to the climax and the all-important big speech.

Seeing this film on opening weekend, one thing that impressed me was how, unlike so many other films that feature a President, this one made no bones about which side was which, even while avoiding actually naming the parties aside from maybe one briefly seen graphic on a TV news report but when Richard Dreyfuss’s Bob Rumsen speaks in front of the Conservative Coalition of America while decrying Sydney as working for ‘an ultra-liberal political action committee’, it’s not exactly left ambiguous. When that Senator is seen plotting while smoking cigars with several of his fellow evil compatriots on the right it paints them with as broad and villainous brush as possible, which I now suspect might be the most believable scene in the film. Maybe back then I also wondered how large amounts of people would feel about being thought of as on the side of the bad guys which may have possibly hurt the film at the box office, giving an ironic spin to when Douglas says, “I don’t think you win elections by telling 59% of the people that they’re wrong.” Now, all these years later, the nastiness of the Dreyfuss character coming from that side is too believable so whatever such people might have thought doesn’t seem to matter very much. We know what they are. It makes me think about how on THE WEST WING it sometimes played like Sorkin seemed to spend part of the time portraying the belief that coming to an agreement was ultimately possible, that if you could just sit down and talk reasonably with the other side it could all end in handshakes while here Reiner didn’t seem to mind presenting them so unredeemable and villainous especially in the nastiness of his old friend Richard Dreyfuss in portraying a sort of anti-avatar to represent what the director believes is everything bad in the world. And, sadly, back in 1995 he had no idea what was to come.

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT wants to believe in those ideals of making the country better while at the same time making your own life better but, more than that, you have to do something about it. You have to act. You can’t just wait. You can’t just stand by while things happen and the other side takes over the conversation and wait for what you think will be your chance to do something about it. From the beginning the plot is clearly designed to build to the State of the Union but the big speech is instead done in the much more intimate setting of the White House Press Room, seemingly on the spur of the moment and the problems in the film are solved with those words when the President finally decides to speak, Paddy Chayefsky for people with an optimistic view of the world. If a woman can get you to feel her passion from all those words, maybe that’s the way to get the public to react too. They’re good words and inspiring thoughts. Some of it could have been written right now. But it’s also a speech that the movie’s bad guy never gets a chance to reply too, and if only it were this easy. If only the good guy saying, “Being president is entirely about character” was something that people could listen to and understand. What also depresses me is how the last thing Michael Douglas says to Annette Bening, which serves as the payoff to a running gag of attempting to send her flowers to illustrate the difficulty of combining the personal and the professional, is no longer possible because of what’s happened in the real world. It’s likely that the people who made THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT didn’t believe any of this was possible. It had too much faith in people.

Michael Douglas is a true movie star here, delivering a performance that is fully confident and a reminder of how good he always was, working his physicality to command every room as the President and always making the dialogue a totally natural part of the intelligence he exudes. Annette Bening is the perfect match for him, playing the part in a way that balances charm and intelligence with a natural quality that comes from everything she says. She brings complete life to every scene she’s in. She beams. It feels like this role was designed to anoint her as the star she hadn’t quite become yet which didn’t really happen as it might have but it really is a reminder of how good Annette Bening has always been. The supporting cast is pretty close to perfect as well including Martin Sheen, now looking like he’s waiting patiently to step into the lead role himself always showing the loyalty he feels to his President plus Shawna Waldron as Lucy Shepherd, Nina Siemasko as Sydney’s sister, Anna Deavere Smith as the press secretary, Samantha Mathis as the personal aide and especially Michael J. Fox making every utterance in his performance as the speechwriter always about the passion and what he believes in. The smarminess of Richard Dreyfuss is so potent you remember him as having a bigger part than he really does and there’s also the very welcome David Paymer as the Deputy Chief of Staff, especially for the way he delivers the extremely Sorkinian line, “I could explain it better, but I’d need charts and graphs and an easel.”

Politics are personal. More than it ever has for me, it feels like the way people behave and they’re passionate about is what they really are deep down. And I think of the way certain people reacted to what happened to Rob Reinder and his wife, the utter emptiness and hatred that must encompass such people deep inside where there is nothing good. There are also the movies that Reiner directed over the past thirty years since THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT that people don’t talk about. THE STORY OF US. ALEX & EMMA. RUMOR HAS IT. THE BUCKET LIST, which, helped by the star power of Jack Nicholson, was a hit but only seems to be remembered for its title and nothing else. Others that I have not seen and possibly will not. We don’t have to mention them. Ultimately, what matters is what matters. Certain films he made matter. The person who Reiner was matters. The way he screamed, “$26,000 WORTH OF SIDES???” in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET matters. Certain other people and their beliefs don’t not to mention the ones who may as well be on that side anyway. THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT might not be the Capraesque classic it clearly wants to be and maybe the way it believes that a firm speech will solve everything represents a denial of such things that I know are out there. But it also represents a dream of possibilities that I want to believe in. I just don’t have the heart for it right now. But maybe someday I will. If only certain things can change.