A new word will have to be invented for what this is. “Mockumentary” brings to mind This is Spinal Tap and the subsequent comedic work of Christopher Guest. Gabriel Range’s Death of a President in no way resembles those films. If anything, this is hard science fiction, looking into an imagined future to reexamine our present.
“It’s fiction in the style of a retrospective documentary,” says Range, a former journalist turned filmmaker, on the phone from Vancouver. “I know it’s not quite as snappy as ‘mockumentary.’ It’s part political thriller, part murder mystery, really.”
It’s a fair description. The picture is set in the near future, looking back at the October 2007 assassination of George W. Bush at a public appearance in Chicago. Like real documentaries examining the shootings of the Kennedys or Martin Luther King, Range uses actual archival footage, but deftly mixes dramatic fictionalized material and interviews with “eyewitnesses.” Actual film of Bush is seamlessly melded with CGI-manipulated material, creating a verité dread not unlike the opening to last year’s Irish political docudrama Omagh. You can feel something bad is coming. The picture shifts gears in the second half as president Cheney (doesn’t that give you a chill?) forces through an updated, civil liberty-crushing new Patriot Act, and a Syrian-born man in the wrong place at the wrong time is arrested and tried for murder.
“Most of the film is the hunt to find the killer,” says Range. “I hope that works. I think it’s a suspenseful description of one of the most important manhunts one could imagine.”
DOAP earned the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and has lit flames of controversy especially, though not surprisingly, in the US. Politically middle-of-the-road senator Hillary Clinton has been one of the most vocal opponents, something the canny publicity machine for the film has utilized in the print ads by using her comments in a column titled “Hasn’t Seen It,” opposite positive spin from reviewers in a second “Has Seen It” column. But CNN and National Public Radio have refused to run broadcast ads for the film, and two American cinema chains, Regal and Cinemark, won’t show it.
“I always knew it was a provocative thing to do, there was a potential for some people to find the starting point to the film offensive,” says Range, who admits to being surprised at the ferocity of the disapproval in some quarters. “I think sometimes film should outrage. I think people thought this would be an exercise in liberal fantasy, that it would be some sort of polemic against Bush. Actually, if you see the film, it’s none of those things. More importantly, it does not take the assassination as the starting point for entertainment.”
Range, with writing partner Simon Finch, has worked in this unique fictional documentary genre before. Their 2003 TV movie for the BBC, The Day Britain Stopped, imagines a transit crisis in the UK precipitated the mid-air collision of two passenger jets. “We were asked to make a film about transport policy, which is like being asked to make a film about paint drying,” he says. “It struck me that this was a powerful way of exploring the future. The fact that characters are talking in the past tense, that it uses the vocabulary of the documentary lends a certain gravitas.”
With DOAP, “it was very important that it feel like the America of today, that the events feel very contemporary.”
Indeed, Bush’s comments about North Korea in the film, pulled from a 2003 hardline speech, are very well timed, though with polls indicating Democrats may take back congress in mid-term elections, Bush’s power is dwindling. Does being from the UK give Range a special objective perspective on American politics, perhaps one that Canadians can relate to?
“There’s actually been a good deal of criticism, the fact that I’m British and making this film,” Range says. “But Tony Blair and George Bush are at great pains to point out that we’re all in this war of terror together. It’s entirely legitimate for me to have made it, or a Canadian to have made it. The film describes the world created since 9/11, and although it was an American event, it has been one with global consequences. And I think there is that sense that you can’t see the river if you’re swimming in it.”
Death of a President is in theatres now.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2006.
