Director: Rob Reiner
Cast: Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox
Have I Seen It Before?: My DVD copy is one of those weird half-cardboard numbers Warner Bros. put out in the world twenty years ago? Whatever happened to those? This is all to say I’ve spent several years putting it on just as regular of re-watch as my DVDs of The West Wing, which is quite a bit.
Did I like it?: Criticism of the work of Aaron Sorkin be a tricky thing. One either has no taste for him, or absolutely adores him. You’d think that this divide might exist with some correlation to political differences, but that isn’t always the case. Certainly, he has a propensity for writing women character who are by all rights intelligent and self-possessed, but somehow end up spending a great deal of time having passages of Intro to US Government explained to them by male characters. He uses certain lines* across his work so often that I’m a little worried he doesn’t remember having written them before his sobriety.
But plenty of people—yours truly included—who have tried to imitate him, so I don’t quite buy the temerity of the latter-day naysayers. At the very least, I am in the camp that lives and dies with his writing, and this was a test-bed for everything that made his greatest work as good as it was. The optimism and decency leaps from the words and lives within you. At least, it lives within me. Your mileage may vary.
Beyond that idealism that admittedly confirms my own thinking about the world, this might even work better as a pure romantic comedy than it does as a polemic. Even then, I can’t conceive of a conservative who might be warmed by the proceedings, even though Ted Cruz somehow managed to plagiarize the climatic speech President Shepherd (Douglas) uses to win Sydney Ellen Wade (Bening) and the country back when he was defending his wife from attacks by the garbage fire that eventually won that election. So, who knows?
* “All you have to do at the end of the day is come home.” “This isn’t camp. It’s not important that everyone gets to play.” “If you had invented/written/created Facebook/Whatever the hell was so goddamn important on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Google common Sorkin lines; there are gigabytes of articles on the subject.