Nick-Davis.com: The American President

The American President
First screened in November 1995 / Reviewed in July 2024

Director: Rob Reiner. Cast: Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, Anna Deavere Smith, Samantha Mathis, Richard Dreyfuss, David Paymer, Shawna Waldron, Nina Siemaszko, Anne Haney, John Mahoney, Wendie Malick, Joshua Malina, Gail Strickland, Beau Billingslea, Taylor Nichols, Ron Canada. Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin.

I hadn't seen this movie since a preview screening at my college in Fall 1995, with an appearance by up-and-coming screenwriter-playwright Aaron Sorkin. He was folksy and excited, and made very clear that this movie was way more "him" than A Few Good Men, which is what most audience members knew him for at the time. He also conveyed that he and Rob Reiner didn't necessarily see all the parts of the script the same way but nonetheless had a really generative and positive collaboration. He maintained that as long as there's mutual respect and engagement, there's a lot to be said for allowing a director creative authority over a screenplay they didn't write. Which I'll just leave right there.

In 1995, a year before voting in my first election, I found The American President disarmingly charming and light on its feet, especially given where the story plays out. I'm happy to say that I still feel that way. At the time, I hadn't beheld Michael Douglas so loose and available to his audience since Romancing the Stone and had never seen Annette Bening play such a cheerful, sprightly character, outside those moments in The Grifters when you've kinda gotta wonder what's behind the giggly put-on. In many future conversations, I stole her line, "I've got something I want to say here, but I'm gonna fumble it a little, so bear with me till I finish," and I'm still grateful for how it allows you to be honest and even incoherent while de-escalating both sides of a difficult conversation. This is not the only time I have pilfered phrasing from a Bening character or from Bening herself in my ongoing quest for achieving full adulthood. I know Sorkin wrote the line, but it's how she reads it that stuck with me.

I watched the movie last night partly out of a half-nostalgic curiosity to test the cultural sphere I grew up in against the one we're in now and to gauge what has and hasn't changed. More pointedly, I screened it as part of my "20th Century Women Playlist" of films that for different reasons feel like valuable check-ins or check-backs while I'm working on my book about that movie. I know the actors (male and female) of 30s and early 40s Hollywood were big influences on how Mike Mills wrote Dorothea in 20CW, but more so in the grounded, palpably tougher vein of Bogart or Stanwyck or Hepburn or Crawford. I wanted to remind myself how Bening came across in an early-career movie I'd never seen again, and how she worked a different side of the 30s street with a sweeter, juicier Irene Dunne/Jean Arthur homage. I also wanted to hold side-by-side Sorkin's and Mills's ways of juxtaposing human-level foibles and tensions against broader political backdrops in U.S. life. What's sticking with me most is how The American President is a kind of 30s movie reimagined for the 90s that would also have worked as an actual Capra or Hawks project, not unlike how 20CW is a late-Obama, pre-Trump malaise movie built as a late-Carter, pre-Reagan malaise movie, so it's a 1970s film made in the 2010s that a Hal Ashby, Claudia Weill, Paul Mazursky, or Martin Ritt might nonetheless have attempted at the time. I'm going to write into that a little.

But I also just enjoyed the movie and found it refreshing to find something so fetching when it could easily have soured or wrinkled on the vine. Occasionally the level of visual polish is a bit much, as if the screen has been Pledged. But John Seale sure can shoot a handsome pop movie, and that burnished photographic texture tells us all we need about the rarefield, Resolute Desk milieu where the movie transpires and on which it comments, while allowing other things, especially the performances, to bring things down a few pegs in terms of lived-in approachability. I think Gloria Gresham nailed those costumes. Douglas looks effortlessly presidential, and from the ball gown to the button-down repurposed as boudoir wear, I believed everything Bening put on; the costumes even fill in some crucial aspects of personality, since Sydney doesn't get quite as many scenes as I'd remembered to teach us about herself.

The whole cast has found such a great collective frequency while also popping in their individual characterizations, from Douglas's rare and convincing venture into easygoing, empathetic masculinity (without omitting some Presidential arrogance) to Anne Haney as the Chief Executive's secretary, or wonderful Martin Sheen as Chief of Staff. Yes, the whole roster of characters and personality baselines is impossible not to see now as a dry-run for The West Wing, and it takes a minute to acclimate to Sheen on the other side of the veto pen. But Reiner, the casting agents, and the actors really achieved something special here—particularly in view of how dire things would get for the grown-up comedy over subsequent years and decades.

I admire Bening's performance a lot while also harboring a question about the high vocal register she's been pushed into and the borderline girlishness her director, I'd imagine, has sought from her. It doesn't mean I don't see a woman and indeed an impressive thinker and lobbyist here; Sydney's giggles and dizzy spells are just part of her human spectrum, and they're well-handled enough to keep The American President fun, when stodginess might have been a risk. But I do wonder how Bening or a Bening peer might have approached the part even a decade later, preserving all the warmth and intelligence with less overlay of the ingénue; that wide-eyed aspect occasionally feels gratuitous, or like a bunch of men's idea of what a President would find instantly attractive. The contralto plainspokenness, the spikiness and smarts, the sailor's knot of looseness and alertness that we now take for granted in Bening might surely have served Sydney Ellen Wade, making her even more of a peer in some ways to President Shepard. Put another way, imagine the Douglas character stumbling unawares into a meet-cute with someone closer to The West Wing's CJ Cregg, so beautifully colored and vivacious in her way without slightly playing down to herself with titters and batted eyelashes—the style Reiner sometimes enlists here from Bening. Movie still works that way, right? Maybe even better, and maybe puts the lobbying and the lovemaking on a more equitable, reciprocally interesting storytelling plane.

But The American President already works well, even very well. I miss this moment when political issues and personality peccadilloes could meld so winningly in a script. The actors all come across like they're very happy to be there. Characters who get introduced early, like Michael J. Fox's speechwriter, are piquant and specific enough that they can get backgrounded for a while in this ambitiously distributed, multifocal script and still make the needed impression when they're drawn back toward the front of the stage. I believe the father-daughter stuff, way more than I easily might have. I love the sheer shadiness of how purely Dreyfuss's character has been conceived as "Rove/Cheney," full-stop, even before many of us had a deep working knowledge of Rove or Cheney (and how happy we were then!).

It's kind of laughable how the movie just takes for granted that a single President bringing a girlfriend home would be enough to stoke a giant fracas over "personal character"; the key conflicts of the second hour are too thinly sketched, which makes the heroes' recuperation from them too wobbly and abstract. Those short cuts and forced arcs represent the movie's most obvious writing problem, I think, symptomatizing how tricky Sorkin still finds it to work between the extremes of a one-hour episode and a year-long season, where he thrives much better. But the movie has also offered us so much warmth and gentleness, so much Oval Office ambivalence and interesting prickliness, so much romance and optimism despite clearly being lit and scored as a halfway fairy tale, that I'm very satisfied and cheered by The American President. I feel good voting for it. And even if the path to the finish feels just a bit hustled or muddled, I kind of love that the concluding note is that we'd all fall in love more with our politicians more if, paraphrasing Audre Lorde, they'd make richer, more constructive use of their anger and drew brighter lines about personal character. I don't mean rage and fulmination. I mean this. And I definitely mean this. Grade: B

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Academy Award Nominations:
	Best Original Score (Musical/Comedy): Marc Shaiman

Golden Globe Nominations:
	Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
	Best Director: Rob Reiner
	Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Annette Bening
	Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Michael Douglas
	Best Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin

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