Death of a President Review

October 31, 2006 12:58 PM
by [email]

For all the controversy surrounding it, Death of a President is a rather bland film that feels like little more than a television documentary.

A mockumentary supposedly airing one year after the 2007 assassination of President Bush, Death of a President begins with a step-by-step build-up to the assassination and then focuses on the question of “who done it.” It is told in typical documentary style, with interviews of “key” players with “archival” footage.

The two parts do not fit well together. The build-up to assassination is moderately interesting, but really only from a “when is he going to bite it” point of view (which is itself a unoriginal rip-off of the JFK assassination). It also seems overly long and pedantic; i.e., in “reality” most viewers would have presumably known many of the details the film slowly takes us through.

The second-half then shifts gears to focus on the investigation of possible assassins. Indeed, the real focus of the movie, the “point” (if there is one) does not come into focus until quite late. I won’t spoil it for you, but the creators of Death of a President would have been better served to focus on it from the beginning: it would have felt more authentic. Instead, the tone seems slightly “off” throughout: you never feel like you have actually jumped forward to 2008.

Another problem is that many of the interviewees are simply too wooden and unemotional about events that would still be quite fresh and would have probably been the biggest/most important event in many of their lives -- whether it be the wife of a man in jail for the alleged assassination, the head of the security detail that “failed”, or the President’s closest advisors.

Ultimately, Death of a President feels like something in between a Dateline NBC expose and an A&E special. I’m sure it is challenging to pull that off about a wholly fictional subject, but so what? No one wants to go to the movies to watch a television documentary, we expect something greater.

Further, a “real” documentary has resonance from the simple fact that it is about real events. But no matter how weighty the subject matter is in Death of a President, it is still made up and the filmmakers fail to create any sense of broader meaning.

The controversy around this film it is not deserved. It is not a very political film, except arguably towards the end, and is largely neutral to positive towards Bush (again except perhaps towards the end). More than anything, this is nothing more than a mediocre film trying to ride a wave of exposure due to its controversial title.

On the positive side, the interspersing of real news footage with the film’s actors is largely done seamlessly. Thus, from a technical point-of-view, the film seems authentic.

But that neat trick alone does not make this a movie worth seeing.