Austin FF Report: Death of a President Review

Reporting from the State Capital of Texas, USA, here is Wells Dunbar on a film that ScreenAnarchy's Matthew called "exploitative filmmaking at its worst."

A Democrat when Democrats ruled the south, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock was the Lone Star embodiment of the Stalinist credo that it's better to be feared than admired. An advocate for the state at all costs, he knew where all the bodies were buried - largely because he put them there. It's only fitting that such an outsized personality should be spiritually interred in a building large enough to dwarf smaller nations' capitals, one sitting in the shadow of Texas' own. The monumental Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum is hegemony chiseled in sunset granite, a red-state ready field-trip through Texas.

It is of no little import, then, that a theater named for the champion and counselor of George W. Bush's presidential ambitions saw the American premiere of Death of a President (AKA DOAP).

Yes, when George W. Bush was but a lowly governor scoffing at death row inmates, it was Bullock who championed and counseled his presidential ambition; now Bullock's Texas-sized IMAX screen would harness W's fictionalized assassination. A secret TBA screening on behalf of the Austin Film Festival, it was announced only earlier that day; it's not unreasonable to speculate that it was kept wrapped precisely so they could show the fucking thing there. With its blindsiding buzz and incendiary subject matter, DOAP recalls another hit documentary - no, nothing from the Michael Moore cannon, but 9/11 "truth movement" darling Loose Change. In their initial overtures, they both unload a searing, visceral throttling on the audience. Unfortunately, both are so riddled with holes by their respective ends as to be transparent.

What DOAP doesn't share with Loose Change is it's direct-to-digital, grubby-fingered aesthetic and editing. Beginning with windswept aerials of Chicago, and inter-cut with evocative, Frontline-style interviews, these scenes' gloss and sheen counterbalance the expertly-edited archival footage of the president and his lackeys. At first it's disconcerting - watching a fictional talking-head reminisce about that fateful October day, and then seeing him or her superimposed behind the president - but the sheer gravitas of the film up to the assassination more than makes up for the odd off-effect. The inexorable, reconstructive pull is almost unbearable - we all know what's coming - and the scenes of Bush gladhanding a hotel ropeline before his murder easily rate among the most tense and rattling recently committed to film.

It's what comes afterwards that robs DOAP of momentum. Life under President Cheney is a nightmarish dispatch from realities unknown; his eulogy for the fallen president, dizzyingly delivered in the Capitol rotunda, is especially shiver-inducing. But for the film's outrageous, attention-grabbing gambit - the murder of the sitting American president - you quickly feel DOAP pull its punches. Policy-making aftershocks of the assassination are alluded to, including PATRIOT 3, hostilities with Syria, and further decimation of American civil liberties. But the film quickly slims into whodunnit mode, weighing a young Muslim's guilt against a decidedly more homegrown possibility. In the end, the cherry-picked case against Jamal Abu Zikri and the blasé nature of the cowered American populace is a subtle indictment of the run-up to war against Iraq. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but who in the hell makes a film about the assassination of the most divisive president in American history to do "subtle?"

The fact that DOAP hasn't been the 24-7 outrage celebre on Fox News and elsewhere testifies to the insanity of this election year in the US. The nightmare ride of the last six years, coupled with the subsequent documentary resurgence, implies an inversely-proportional relationship between the health of the country and her documentary cinema; when times are bad, there's that much more muck to rake. DOAP may be the end expression of this trend, the documentary's meta-deathknell in the age of "truthiness." The lines were already blurred before Errol Morris employed his trademark hypnotics and reenactments; the fact that even mainstream "edgy" fare employs breathless vérité work says documentaries want to look like feature films, and feature films like documentaries. Real footage looks fake, the false is made real. DOAP looks like both.

[The film is scheduled for release in selected US cities on October 27, 2006.]

LINKS

Austin FF info page.
Official Site (Embedded Quicktime Trailer; downloadable trailers here)
Newmarket Films (US distributor)

Bad ju ju rising - photographic detail from the Bob Bullock Theater

Review by Wells Dunbar