Death of a President

Just saw Death of a President at the local art house cinema--I was interested enough in seeing it that I had emailed the folks who run the place about a week ago:

Hello--

Long time Princess Cinema member; I just had a question about choices for upcoming films. Is the Princess planning on getting Death of a President? If so, when do you think it might be showing? I was guessing that it would have a pretty small distribution, even with the media publicity it got recently.

[the cinema owner quickly responded:]

I thought the same, but I was wrong. It open a local multiplex chain cinema this coming weekend for a small one or two week run. I may end up laying sometime in new year or not at all. Go figure... I don't get it why they would do it...

I was pleasantly surprised that it was showing there already. For those who have not heard much about the film, it is a piece of "speculative fiction" in the form of a documentary around 2008, after the assassination of President Bush. It is a series of talking-head interviews, video news clips, and investigative reporting on the day of the shooting, the shooting itself, and the investigation.

I thought the film was incredibly well done, and quite gripping throughout. I did not find it exploitative or worthy of the furor that has erupted about it in some media. Yes, there are characters who hate Bush in the film--the crowds of protestors--but they were all pretty realistic characterizations. The anarchist-ringleader type with a bar code tattoo on his neck--that was a perfect touch to nail that character.

The clever weaving of archive footage to create this story was very well done--some reviewers pointed out technical gaffes, but I didn't find them distracting ("Um, duh, I know that the president didn't actually get shot, so I know they have to stitch together some archives.") The thing that sealed it for me was the characters in the interviews--the head Secret Service agent, the president's speechwriter (and both characters' obvious loyalty and grief), the Chicago police chief, the ex-FBI forensics technician, and others. I thought they were spot-on--they had the same type of hesitation, emotion, self-aggrandizement, or self-doubt that you see in these kinds of interviews in reality.

Some reviewers though that this film fell short because it did not explore more of the way the world would change due to this event. A fair criticism, but you could say that was not the filmmaker's goal. Others criticized it for being, well, boring. For instance, "... the amount of time he spends on faux forensics is enough to put even die-hard CSI fans to sleep." I'd tend to disagree with that, but then again, I've read chunks of Tedeschi's Forensic Medicine out of random curiosity (it's in the MIT Medial library). I guess that given I'm addicted to documentaries (e.g., Frontline), so this film was pretty much right up my alley.

Oh yeah--there's a really clever twist, which you would not expect from a mock-documentary. Well done, that.