A Dated President
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Movies A Dated President By John Podhoretz Afew years ago, Robert Red-ford's company announced it was developing a movie for him entitled The President Elopes-a romantic comedy about a widower...
...Soft stories about the glow in the White House would be published daily...
...Early on in The American President, someone describes the title character as "the chief executive of Fantasyland...
...Reiner and Sorkin wanted to stress liberal politics, Redford's people said, whereas Redford was interested in the romance...
...And here's what we don't see, but can intimate from the final few seconds: The nation is saved from Bob Dole...
...George Stephanopou-los is delighted...
...The king of the latter-day Hollywood leftists, Redford brought All the President's Men to film, suffered a huge box-office catastrophe when his Castro-loving epic Havana came out just as communism was collapsing, and uses his Sundance Institute to fund so-called "independent American films" that share a vision of America as a nuke-loving hell of capitalist excess...
...After a hard night alone, the president reveals he is a changed man...
...What's going on here...
...Maintaining a legend over time is a little like maintaining a successful political career: The last thing you want to do is alienate a large segment of your audience by separating yourself from them...
...Exactly...
...Reiner and Sorkin are so determined to prove they understand how Washington really works that they forget we are at the theater because we want to watch two people fall in love...
...He is, in other words, Bill Clinton, and Reiner and Sorkin are spending $50 million in Hollywood simoleons to give the current occupant of the White House a talking-to about how to be the chief executive of the United States...
...It was not to be...
...Redford is notorious for changing his mind about his projects, sometimes within days of beginning to film them, but The President Elopes seemed a sure bet for the highly political actor-director who loves to tell interviewers that he has long been urged to run for office himself...
...He screams obscenities back at them...
...Women would mimic his girlfriend's hairstyle...
...It plays so many clever and touching riffs on the question of how, exactly, a president might court a lady fair that the movie might have been a classic if only Reiner and Sorkin had followed the advice of the most liberal movie actor since the days of the Hollywood 10 and downgraded the politics...
...A liberal movie too political for Robert Redford...
...So what better vehicle than a romantic comedy about the White House could Redford use to indulge his taste for ideological preachment...
...Not here...
...it's about Clinton and Dole, about the National Rifle Association and global warming...
...Movies A Dated President By John Podhoretz Afew years ago, Robert Red-ford's company announced it was developing a movie for him entitled The President Elopes-a romantic comedy about a widower president and the difficulties he would have if he tried to pursue a romantic relationship while occupying the White House...
...Annette Bening comes back to the White House in her sweat pants and plants a big wet one on Michael Douglas right in the Oval Office...
...The climax has to do with the votes on a crime bill of three Michigan congressmen we never see...
...Rob Reiner, one of the half-dozen most successful directors in Hollywood, had taken on the project and had brought with him Aaron Sorkin, the author of Reiner's previous Washington movie, A Few Good Men...
...Upset that the president is doing nothing to combat the attacks on him, characters based on George Stephanopoulos (a brilliant, career-saving performance by Michael J. Fox) and Mac McLarty (Martin Sheen) scream at the president about how he is failing to stand up for principle...
...In its last half-hour, Reiner and Sorkin decide that The American President isn't about Douglas and Bening...
...if we had a popular widower president with a teenage daughter who began to date while in the White House, the nation would go absolutely mad for it-it would be an American version of Charles and Diana before the troubles...
...When Redford announced last year that he was dropping out of The President Elopes-by this point retitled The American President-he said he was doing so for a most surprising reason...
...The snake in the garden of the president's romance is a Republican senator from Kansas named Bob (Richard Dreyfuss), who makes a regular practice of attacking Bening...
...Thus, they give The American President a climax inadvertently touching for its faith in a dying religion: a five-minute sermon, delivered by Michael Douglas before a rapt White House press corps at the morning press briefing...
...The Republican attacks cause the president to lose 20 points off his popularity polls...
...The world is saved from global warming...
...We don't want to watch the lady inform the gentleman that she is leaving him because the nation needs a 20 percent reduction in fossil-fuel emissions...
...If you are too obvious about your politics, as Redford was with Havana, that part of the audience that does not share your views may not feel so kindly about you afterward...
...His poll numbers would soar, not shrink...
...This is absurd on its face...
...He defends the American Civil Liberties Union, supports flag burning, advocates a draconian environmental bill, and seeks legislation to ban all guns...
...Crime disappears from the streets when gun control passes...
...She knows what Reiner and Sorkin want her to know: The president is a trimmer, a liberal who won't stand up for what he believes because he is too busy trying to win the next election...
...Well, you don't get to be a superstar-Redford was, I think, the first Hollywood performer to whom that noxious, if useful, term was applied in the late 1960s, and it still describes his status today- without taking care to protect your image...
...Reiner's The American President, with a charming Michael Douglas in the role Redford would have played, is an enjoyable jape for the most part, a glossy piece of work with the usually wooden Annette Bening radiant as the environmental lobbyist who brings romance into the president's life for the first time since his wife's death...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 12
