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DEATH OF A PRESIDENT
Directed by Gabriel Range.
Produced by: Range, Simon Finch, Ed Guiney & Robin Gutch.
Written by: Range & Finch.
Director of Photography: Graham Smith.
Edited by: Brand Thumim.
Music by: Richard Harvey.
Released by: Newmarket Films & Film4.
Country of Origin: UK. 93 min. Rated: R.
With: Hend Ayoub, Brian Boland, Becky Ann Baker, Robert Mangiardi, Jay Patterson, Jay Whittaker, Michael Reilly Burke, & James Urbaniak.

Death of a President is provocative, but not inflammatory as its title may suggest, and less a paranoid political thriller, like The Manchurian Candidate, than a political exposé. Unlike other films placing newsmakers in a fictional context (The Queen), this is not an equal opportunity offender. Using the imaginary assassination of George W. Bush as a jumping point, director Gabriel Range daringly suggests the current administration would handle the aftermath of the fictional assassination in the same way it has dealt with 9/11, the build-up to the war in Iraq, and the Iraqi insurgency. The point of view will be familiar from the news and documentaries, but conveyed more subtly than, say, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 or Robert Greenwald’s Uncovered: The War on Iraq.

Beginning on the fateful day of October 19, 2007, Air Force One lands at O’Hare International Airport. Bush is to deliver a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, where thousands of protestors are out on the streets and getting out of hand, including at one point storming the presidential motorcade. The well-paced film steadily builds its case with talking-head accounts of the president’s security detail, the assassination, and the rounding-up of suspects. (The shooting is captured on camera in a blur, bringing to mind the 1981 video footage of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.) However, you can hardly blame Range for adding a disclaimer at the end that Death is a work of fiction. A film very much of the moment, the filmmaker arrestingly uses current events to depict the tenor (or terror) of the times. A timely “Sea of Japan incident” with North Korea, the secretive machinations of the Syrian government, and Iraqi war vets are all thrown into the mix.

And in its look and tone, the film is convincing – a bombardment of archival footage, seamlessly edited and repurposed, with blue-screened fictional characters, à la Forrest Gump. (However, shot on a limited budget, the number of protestors on the streets of Chicago doesn’t seem close to 12,000.) With her pearl necklace and camel blazer, Becky Ann Baker as Bush’s speechwriter Eleanor Drake especially has the rehearsed speech pattern and poise of a camera-ready pro. In perhaps the film’s most pointed dig at the current Republican agenda, she praises the newly sworn-in president, Dick Cheney, as having the “power of leadership that was invested into him by God.” Needless to say, the film preaches to the choir already critical of the Bush White House. Far from being an incitation to violence, it is an affirmation to this audience of the country’s direction. Kent Turner
October 27, 2006