Sauce

Years after the assassination of George W. Bush, an investigative documentary team interviews those most closely associated with the event. The subject matter of this fictional documentary is fascinating as is the cinematic trickery employed to recreate the shooting of the President. However, the idea ends up being more compelling than the sometimes ponderous on-screen autopsy of the night and the ensuing investigation.

On the streets of Chicago, protestors clash with police as the President delivers a personable address to his admirers, safe inside the comfortable surroundings of a hotel. The contrast between ideologies couldn’t be clearer and the sense of danger is enhanced in light of earlier events depicted, where the same protestors halted the President’s motorcade. The brewing civic dissent doesn’t stop the President from greeting his admirers at the rope-line afterwards, and it is here that he meets his downfall in a particularly well-shot scene combining archival footage and CGI. That’s the first thirty minutes of the film – genuinely taut and tense, and tragic in the truest sense of the word.

The Bush depicted in this film is almost fatherly and the reverence with which his surviving staffers remembers him makes the actual shooting fairly shocking, because you’re, and I use the word hesitantly, liking the bumbling ol’ retard by this point. This is not a Michael Moore anti-Bush polemic, more a special extended episode of Four Corners. This is both, ultimately, the strength and weakness of Death of a President.

The film does an admirable job of presenting a plausible sequence of events in the aftermath of the shooting. Dick Cheney assumes the Presidency and passes Patriot Act III, and a Syrian national, Jamal Zikri, is quickly identified and vilified as the assassin on the most threadbare of evidence, drawing disturbing parallels with the Haneef case in recent weeks in our own media. Had I seen this film a few months prior I might even have been surprised at this turn of events. What did surprise me was that the film does not dwell too long on the increased dissolution of civil liberties brought about by the President’s death, but that the investigation continues down the “whodunnit?” path. This results in a fairly dull third act, replete with the requisite “ah-HA!” twist that, though thematically integral, lacks the dramatic punch of the first thirty minutes.

Despite this climactic misfire, the film manages to get under the skin. Every interviewee is earnestly believable as they recount the parts they played before and after the fateful event and, if nothing else, the filmmaker’s sheer balls at having the moxy to depict the on-screen assassination of one of the most controversial world-leaders of our times deserves applause. Despite how you may personally feel about Bush’s tenure as President, Death of a President serves as a modern-day parable preached from a smoking gun on the tenth floor. The message is bang on target – better the devil you know, and be satisfied with the freedom you have today.

CHRIS RATTRAY