A sick movie indeed
Yesterday I picked up a few to tide me through the weekend. Two in particular are worthy of comment. The first is Death of a President, a British "mockumentary" on the (obviously fictional) assassination of George W. Bush in Chicago on October 19, 2007.
The film was broadcast on the BBC in 2006. At the time, I commented on how disgusted I was by the premise- a reaction shared by people as diverse as Hillary Clinton and Kevin Kostner. If I had a dime for every sick Democrat and Leftist I've heard wishing precisely for Mr. Bush's death over the past eleven years, I'd be financially much better off than I am today. To actually make a film about such an ugly premise struck me as the height of bad taste.
But when I saw it at the library, curiosity got the better of me. It's actually rather well-done, and goes to great lengths to portray Mr. Bush positively- at least from a personal point of view. The number of hate-filled nut cases among his critics is even acknowledged. For most of the film, I was surprised to find Rex Reed's observation that the film lacked a political agenda actually plausible.
The size of the anti-war movement seemed to me to be greatly overestimated by the film. Certainly the size of the demonstration which greets Mr. Bush on the way to his "final speech" is way, way over the top. But as I said earlier, no attempt was made to conceal or disguise the number of vicious nut cases in it. When Mr. Bush is shot from the window of a Clark Street building while exiting the Sheraton Hotel after a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, suspicion initially falls on one of the organizers of massive demonstrations which earlier had forced the emergency alteration of the President's route from O'Hare to the Sheraton. As the media and the President's official family hold vigil at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the FBI and the Chicago Police Department clear the organizer, who is clearly depicted as a despicable and hate-filled creep. Evidence seems to point to a Syrian-American who was, by sheer coincidence, present at the shooting, but actually played no role in it.
"President" Cheney initially is shown as perseverating on the idea that Syria's Ba'athist regime orchestrated the shooting. But the film goes to such great lengths to avoid the appearance of an anti-Bush hatchet job that Cheney- one of the crazy Left's favorite villians- is depicted as abandoning that idea when the evidence fails to support it.
Others in the government do not, however, and the Syrian is convicted of the President's murder on the basis of circumstantial (though plausible) evidence adduced by law enforcement officials who are depicted throughout the film as decent, honorable and competent. Eventually, however, it developes that the actual assassin is a veteran of the First Gulf War who lost one son to an IED in the second, and whose other son is suffering from PTSD and an ongoing struggle with drug addiction after returning from Iraq. Mr. Bush, the assassin's suicide note charges, is responsible for "murdering" truth, justice and the American way- all the things the assassin fought for in the First Gulf War- through the prosecution of the Second. Alas, it seems that, for all its elaborate attempts to seem fair and reasonable, the film has an anti-Bush agenda after all.
As the film closes, the innocent Syrian-American is on death row at Statesville. The government is dragging its feet in exploring the conclusive evidence-including a confession and secret documents concerning proving the President's movements the day of the shooting found among the papers of the veteran who, as the film makes clear, was the actual shooter. The honest cops, FBI agents, and prosecutors involved in the case have, in several cases, resigned in protest. But the implication is that an innocent man is going to be executed, largely because he happens to be a Muslim.
As the Iraq war winds down, our victory in Iraq becomes manifest, and history vindicates Mr. Bush, films like this one are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The massacre in Arizona the other day certainly illustrates the consequences of having allowed our political discourse to become so polarized and extreme. But this movie, with its tasteless theme, cannot pose as a mere indictment of the trend, though I sense that its makers would like to argue that such is the case. It's not merely an indictment of partisan hatred and extremism; it's an example of them. Tt the end of the day, no matter how competently done and actually engrossing at times, Death of a President remains a disgusting piece of partisan trash, all the more despicable for its elaborate attempt to make its accusations against Mr. Bush palatable by its restrained and even sympathetic portrayal of the man personally.
The point, I think, is made quite well by simply asking onesself what the reaction of the Left would be to a movie made by a conservative- however sympathetically it might portray Barack Obama personally- which, at a moment at which the hate-filled nuts of the Right are engaging in precisely the same kind of sputtering and bombast their cousins on the Left made a way of life throughout the previous administration, depicted him as being assassinated by an Afghan War veteran angry at his willingness to endanger the success of our arms by creating a deadline in advance for our withdrawal in the face of the Taliban.
Can you even imagine the outcry?
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