>>PREVIEW
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT
STARRING: Hend Ayoub, George W. Bush, Brian Boland and Becky Ann Baker
DIRECTED BY: Gabriel Range
Opens Friday, October 27
Check listings
Making fun of U.S. President George W. Bush has become a very profitable industry. Michael Moore has made millions from it and North American bookstore shelves are full of Bush-bashing titles like Dumbass and The Bush-Hater’s Handbook. Even though Bush may be the worst president in American history, these ad hominem criticisms seem to sting him as much as toy arrows. Furthermore, they’re as original as reality TV.
They lack impact because they’re trite and predictable – George W. Bush is a moron, he looks like a monkey, he can’t string together a sentence and so on. We’ve heard it all a million times before. It’s therefore refreshing to see British filmmaker Gabriel Range doing something different – and actually original – with his controversial award-winning film Death of a President.
"Turning Bush into a symbol of hatred, I think, is counterproductive," explains Range. "It would have been very simple to have made a sort of a polemic, some sort of straightforward anti-Bush rant, but I don’t think that would have been very interesting or satisfying."
Instead, Death of a President explores the climate of fear that’s permeated the West since 9/11 by portraying the fictional assassination of Bush, who is shot in Chicago after giving a speech to businesspeople. The story is told in a documentary-style that Range describes as "part political thriller, part murder mystery."
"I wanted to try and use the lens of the future, this hypothetical situation, as a way of reflecting on some of the things that are happening today," says Range.
The film won the international critics’ prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, but not everyone is thrilled about the film – especially in the US. On the day the film premiered in Toronto, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote: "The fantasies (the film) feeds are grotesque and obscene… That such a movie could not only be made but lionized at an international film festival is a mark not of sophistication, but of a sickness in modern life that should alarm conservatives and liberals alike."
Similar reactions have been common around the U.S. – mostly, Range notes, from people who haven’t seen the film. Even Senator Hillary Clinton weighed in, calling the film "despicable" and saying its premise "makes me sick."
"I actually find it chilling that somebody like Hillary Clinton is prepared to condemn a film she hasn’t seen," says Range. "One of the ironies is that this film describes the dangers of a rush to judgment."
The response from people who have seen the film has been quite different. Some reviewers have even said the film is sympathetic to Bush, because it portrays him as a human being and not just a monkey-faced dumbass.
"In order to show the assassination as a horrific event – which I truly believe it would be – it was very important that you had a sense of George W. Bush as a human being," explains Range.
"Although the film is critical of the Bush administration, I hope that there is also some implied criticism of the people who just say, ‘Oh, I hate Bush.’ Because I don’t think it’s very helpful to just declare hatred of Bush as an individual, rather than actually having some sort of sensible debate about the administration’s policies." |
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