The American President

The American President

It is hard to create a nice love story, even harder to make a good comedy and still harder to make an intelligent film about politics. “The American President,” directed by Rob Reiner, does all three with cheerful confidence. It is also the kind of movie that, by the time it has charmed us into such a state of smiling receptivity, will forgive it anything; for a while there, as movies have an obligation to do in return for being so difficult and expensive to make at all, it allows us to believe in the American dream again.

Above everything else, this is a smart romantic comedy that does not let itself get derailed by politics. Widowed several years earlier, Shepherd (Michael Douglas), the president of the United States, is a charming middle aged man who one day meets Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening) an environmental lobbyist new to Washington. He knows he’s hooked when he asks one of his aides what would happen if he invited her to accompany him to a state dinner.

“Do you want your pollster to put together some numbers?” asks the aide but that’s exactly what Shepherd doesn’t want: every move calculated for its effect on public opinion. The president gets her number from his Secret Service guards and then calls her himself which she can’t believe because she thought she told him she didn’t have a phone yet because she just moved here and is living with her sister; so she hangs up; so he calls back; so she thinks it’s another prank call, and tells him he has “a great.”

Because Douglas makes such a convincing president (even though we don’t know whether we’d elect him) and Bening makes such an interesting woman (even though we don’t know whether we’d vote for her), and because the opening scenes establish convincingly how power flows through this White House bureaucracy like water through pipes under a city, the scene is not a sitcom gag but an explosion. Comedy is about tension release; we laugh not because it’s funny but because we’re relieved.

We believe in these people, we care about them, and so when the movie puts the presidency between them it creates genuine stakes; will they be together? We care all during the film, which is another way of saying that everything else works just as well including the moments when “The American President” plays like a Frank Capra movie with dirty thoughts. Many of the big laughs come from Shepherd’s inability to do simple things in ordinary ways.

He doesn’t want his staff handling personal matters; fine. But how does he order flowers over the phone when all his credit cards are in storage with his other stuff in Wisconsin? How does he bring a date home when there are breathless reporters camped outside every gate of the White House grounds? What about Sydney, who has worked years for professional respectability and who is told by her boss (John Mahoney) that “the time it takes you to go from presidential girlfriend to cocktail party joke can be timed with an egg”?

And what fun for high powered political players on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue Republicans who want someone conservative enough to pound on defense spending but safe enough not to hammer them on social issues; Democrats who want someone liberal enough to hammer Republicans on environment and crime bills but safe enough not to pound themselves into deficits. Which is more important, state dinners or summit meetings?

Which produces greater public gladness: banning land mines or allowing us back into our national parks? At first you think this kind of dialogue must have been dreamed up for the movie. Then you realize this conversation has been going on for years at Washington dinner parties and Beltway bars; only nobody ever says it out loud (or maybe they do).

“The American President” was written by Aaron Sorkin, whose TV series “The West Wing” is about another president. It balances three elements all the way through. One involves the relationship between Shepherd and Wade; another has to do with her job as a lobbyist for an environmental group that needs votes from members of Congress who are holding out for passage of a bill on fuel efficiency.

The third involves what’s happening in the White House, where Shepherd faces a challenge in an election year from a powerful conservative senator (Richard Dreyfuss) and wants to get a controversial crime bill passed something he’ll need Reiner’s help for, because nobody ever accused Reiner of not being politically correct.

For a typical Hollywood film, the political parts would be covered up with vague terms of generalization, and the personality of the president would most likely not be identified by ideology. “The American President” is praiseworthy in that real problems gun control, environmental issues are treated realistically in a number of subplots leading to a presidential press conference that has some reverberation even in today’s political climate. (The liberal Shepherd learns that he must be decisive and take unpopular stands.)

The movie’s heart is of course the love story, and Douglas and Bening have amazing chemistry; their scenes are written and played so as to build the comedy without ever losing sight of the fact that two such individuals might very well find themselves in similar circumstances. The inevitable tactical questions (such as whether the power of “the most powerful man in the free world” reaches to his bedside prowess) are part of the mutual embarrassment both feel because well, for one thing, because they’re sleeping together for God’s sake.

Douglas has been making a specialty lately of more overtly sexual roles, as in “Disclosure,” where he seemed like nothing more than an instrument of the plot. Here he seems so much more three-dimensional, more vulnerable, smarter, nicer. And Bening is just luminous; I had hoped to go through my whole career as a film critic without once having to write that a smile “lights up the screen,” but there it is. Looking around me at other screenings during this year’s Festival du Cannes, I noticed audience members smiling back.

Around Douglas and Bening we find yet another excellent supporting cast: Martin Sheen as the president’s right hand man; Michael J. Fox as his ideological conscience; Anna Deavere Smith as his press secretary; David Paymer as a pollster (his name Kodak suggests snapshots of national mood swings; Shepherd is an evocative name for any president); Shawna Waldron as the president’s pre-teen daughter, whose role is written and played with as much intelligence as anyone else’s.

One of the feelings that comes most strongly from “The American President” is a simple affection for the presidency.

When I was growing up, “The president of the United States” was one word, said reverently, and embodied great power and virtue. Now it’s like the punch line to a joke; both parties have cheapened the office by their potshots at its occupants. Reiner manages to suggest some of the moral weight of the presidency while at the same time filling us in on a lot of stuff we didn’t know about how things really work in this White House.

Watching “The American President,” I felt respect for its craft: the flawless re-creation of the physical world of the White House; the smart and accurate dialogue; love-story manipulation designed to tug our heartstrings. This is also a film with a liberal political point of view, which takes nerve; it would have been easy enough to create an Identikit president with manufactured issues. It’s also, incidentally, a great entertainment one of this year’s best films.

Watch The American President For Free On Gomovies.