Review of "Death of a President" from Toronto Film Festival

[NYCGirl]

From this review, the biggest "crime" of the film is that it's TEDIOUS.

http://www.cinematical.com/2006/09/12/tiff-review-death-of-a-president-d-o-a-p/

The proof, however, would be in the pudding -- and today on an overcast Toronto morning, the line for the pudding went around the block from the Cumberland theater. Having seen the film, I'll share the following observations about Death of a President: First, the press-and-industry screening this morning did, in fact, receive some applause as the credits rolled -- neither timid golf-claps nor an exultant celebration, but some. The second fact about Death of a President is even more stark and essential: It's not very good. Death of a President is not made as a broad-scale look at what might happen to the world, the state of things in the event of the murder of George W. Bush, or whoever may hold the office of the presidency. It's a tired, tedious mix of procedural-style storytelling, in which we're asked to engage in a slow-crawl mystery: Who really killed George W. Bush in October, 2007?

Director Gabriel Range (a British TV veteran) gives us a lengthy walk-through to set the scene -- A Presidential visit to Chicago ; angry protestors in the streets; Secret Service precautions; shots ring out. Never mind that Range and Simon Finch's screenplay takes an interminably long time to set up and -- pardon the phrase -- execute the central idea of the film. More damning is that for all the dramatic and artistic possibilities in the idea, the film executing that idea is a damp squib, a slow-paced obvious murder tale. Death of a President plays like a mix of the worst parts of C.S.I. (blood, guts, tech-babble) and Ken Burns (long-winded interviews, easy sentiment, visual stasis). Nor does it work as satire or commentary -- it's loaded with too much tedium to be shocking, and watching the film's clanging, wooden attempts at political allegory or cultural analysis is cringe-inducing.

In Death of a President, a fictional Bush speechwriter notes of George W. Bush that he had a way of "taking advantage of people who underestimated him." Depending on your politics, you can parse that observation a thousand ways. But Range and the producers of Death of a President are committing a similar sin: They're taking advantage of people who are over-estimating them. People and the press have been buzzing about Death of a President for days -- an eternity in today's news cycles -- and today was the day the world got to see if Death of a President had incendiary art or just an inflammatory premise; if it would be a great examination of 'what if?' or a great example of 'why bother?' You can -- and should be able to -- make art about the tragedy of any person's death, President to pauper. But Death of a President isn't art, or even entertainment: It's the art-house, indie-doc equivalent of Snakes on a Plane, where someone thought of a single idea and then, it seems based on the end-resulting film, stopped thinking altogether.