Toronto Film Festival

The festival's hottest movie imagines the assassination of George W. Bush. Plus: The new Dixie Chicks film is a rousing shout of defiance.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Dixie Chicks, Toronto Film Festival, Reviews

Reuters/JP Moczulski

The Dixie Chicks -- left to right, Emily Robison, Natalie Maines and Martie Maguire -- arrive for the premiere of "Shut Up and Sing" in Toronto.

Sept. 13, 2006 | TORONTO -- Because anyone who works in the media these days has to pursue what's hot, I began the day Tuesday with a faux documentary and ended it, thankfully, with the real deal. There's been so much buzz here around U.K. filmmaker Gabriel Range's ersatz documentary, "Death of a President" -- in the Toronto program notes and schedules, it has been coyly referred to by its less-incendiary acronym, "D.O.A.P." -- that most journalists and critics attending the festival knew they'd have to arrive extremely early for the screening. As it shook out, perhaps as many as half of those who had lined up were turned away.

"Death of a President" has been roundly excoriated by conservatives (even before anyone had actually seen it, of course) because it blends fictional footage and real news clips, touched up with bits of CGI, to fashion a fake documentary depicting the assassination of George W. Bush and its aftermath. In the movie's scenario, the president has come to Chicago to speak at a business luncheon, and upon his arrival, he's greeted by a crowd of surly protesters -- the suggestion being that everyone hates him so much, just about anyone might be a potential assassin. When the president emerges from the luncheon, he's felled by a sniper's bullet. The moment is swift and, for what it's worth, deftly handled -- except that Range can't help adding cheesy action-movie music as chaos erupts and ambulances and other vehicles rush to and from the scene. Is this serious political commentary, or an episode of "ChiPs"?

The president dies a few hours later. But the assassin is still at large, and the authorities have to pin the crime on someone. In this alternative universe, actors portray close (fictional) presidential associates, FBI officials, police commissioners and Secret Service men, relaying their impressions and observations about what happened on that day and their ideas about who may have committed the deed. A presidential advisor and speechwriter -- a pleasant-looking woman with a round face and bright orange hair -- speaks glowingly of how charismatic the president could be in front of a live crowd, and eventually winds around to asserting, her eyes all glassy and robotic, that he surely was doing God's work. Another bland-looking official explains that, sure, the first people you'd look at as suspects would be people with Arabic-sounding names. It's not racist, he claims, practically shrugging. "It's just common sense."

In other words, "Death of a President" offers nothing but predigested ideas, spouted not by people but by stereotypes. The movie doesn't make you think; it just confirms what you already think you know. The picture is clearly geared to liberal audiences, and it plays to its crowd like a preacher at a revival meeting. But instead of guiding us toward any nuanced thought or complicated moral issues, Range merely outlines the kind of clichéd possibilities that most reasonably intelligent, left-leaning individuals could scrawl on a cocktail napkin in three minutes. In Range's puny vision, if the president were shot, any or all of the following would be likely to happen: The list of suspects would tilt heavily toward individuals with Arabic-sounding names; the administration would immediately look to blame al-Qaida, or, barring that, Syria; innocent people would be locked up, just because the evidence against them happened to be convenient; the Patriot Act would be immediately amended to restrict Americans' civil liberties even further; and through it all, white guys in suits would talk tough and throw their power around, because that's just what white guys do.

The picture is designed to make us cluck-cluck with disapproval at each successive revelation, patting ourselves on the back for being hip to the Bush administration's deceptions and manipulations (as if it takes any sort of brain trust to figure out that these cowboys are bad news, and our country is in dire straits). Range's M.O. is to manufacture injustice so he can step in heroically to document it, and a good portion of the audience I saw the movie with seemed to buy in to this ruse: I could sense waves of self-congratulation rippling across the crowd, and a good portion applauded at the end.

Dramatically, the film is a snooze. And even though the phony-documentary effects are pretty smoothly executed, on the whole the picture isn't even put together in a particularly coherent way. It's a stunt more than a movie, and if this is what's passing for intelligent liberal thought in this (or any other) country, we're really in trouble. What's upsetting about the flap surrounding this picture -- which, it was announced on Monday, was picked up for distribution by Newmarket Films -- isn't that conservatives are offended by it; it's that liberals aren't. Why do you think they call it D.O.A.P.?

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