Death of a President
All right, everybody take a deep breath. "Death of a President," the British faux-documentary that's a four-alarm scandal only to those who haven't seen it, opens today -- and turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.
Let's get to the nub of the matter. Directed by Gabriel Range and written by him with Simon Finch , "Death" imagines the late 2007 assassination of George W. Bush primarily as a means to examine the political aftermath -- a clampdown on civil liberties and a desperate search for the gunman that coughs up a convenient Arab Muslim suspect who happens to be innocent.
Meanwhile, the real killer is closer to home while still tied to our adventures abroad. Far from envisioning conspiracies, "Death" sees the assassination as a case of damaged chickens coming home to roost and the government's response as extreme and very scared. As what-if scenarios go, it's not completely preposterous.
But is it exploitive? "Death" bends over backward to not play the title tragedy for sensationalism, which obviously won't matter if you find the very idea seditious. The first third of the film is set in Chicago, as Bush arrives for a speech to business leaders. The clips we see are repurposed from existing news footage, but the mob of angry activists outside the hotel appears to have been staged by Range. The speech Bush delivers is one he actually gave in Chicago on Jan. 7, 2003, and he comes off well: affable, articulate, sympathetic.
Range then brings Bush out of the hotel (using a brief shot of an actor with the president's face digitally superimposed on his head) , and as "filmed" by a news camera across the street, there is a muffled shot, a confusing flurry of motion, and the ambulances are off to the hospital. A nation mourns, President Dick Cheney is seen giving a eulogy (actually, it's the one he delivered at Ronald Reagan's funeral), and "Death" sets about its main order of business.
Which is to imply that the sitting government of the United States is so hamstrung by ideology, so rigid in its global intentions, that it refuses to see the truth of the tragedy even when the evidence becomes overwhelming. "Death of a President" says that George W. Bush is a convenient, electable sock-puppet for the true architects of his administration but that they'd easily carry on without him and even use his death to tighten their grip. Personally, if I were president, I might find the notion that I'm completely disposable more insulting than imagined assassination.
Range stages "interviews" with ersatz Secret Service agents, policy makers, and relatives of the various accused to cook up a vision of a willfully blind government rushing to judgment. You can debate from here to the next election whether such media manipulation is irresponsible -- given that the film has a case to make but not an ax to grind keeps the intentions reasonably honorable -- but the blunt fact is that "Death of a President" just isn't very good at the fakery.
The "interviewees" feel like actors, the crowd scenes feel underpopulated, the imitation
A further irony is that other documentaries, real documentaries, exist that more damningly depict the government's mistreatment of accused prisoners (Michael Winterbottom 's semi-docu "The Road to Guantanamo" ) and the psychological damage wreaked upon both US soldiers (Patricia Foulkrod 's "The Ground Truth" ) and the people of Iraq (James Longley 's upcoming "Iraq in Fragments" ).
"Death of a President," by contrast, never escapes a fundamental naivete in style and content, most notably in establishing an inflammatory premise that it's too studious or timid to subsequently address. You could say the film lacks the courage of its own tastelessness. Or you could say that truth is stranger -- more barbed, less forgiving -- than metafiction.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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