Ray Pride

The two most beautiful sentences I've read in weeks, and they were likely penned by a lawyer: "This film is fictional. It is set in the future." Coming at the end of British director Gabriel Range's "Death of a President," about the October 2007 aftermath of authoritarian opportunism when President Bush is killed while visiting Chicago, it suits Range's neatly arrayed paranoid prognostications, which, of course, is trumped by reality each and every day. ("Habeas Corpus"? What's that?) How would a patriot act after the death of a president? By destroying every last vestige of civil liberties and anointing themselves saviors; by committing all manner of craven cover-up and pitiful power grab, "DOAP" suggests. Range's use of Chicago topography (and footage drawn from several Bush visits to this city) is astute, as is the examination and reexamination of "surveillance" footage in the fictional dissection of whodunit. Peter Watkins' "The War Game" and Kevin Brownlow's "It Happened Here" are obvious antecedents for this style of speculative fiction, and while "DOAP" proposes the existential quandary of a fear of "terrorists" dictating entirely the course of a country's decisions, the film's follow-through, while compelling, never reaches the heights of irresponsibility attained by numberless politicians and business leaders. Of Nazism, and by extension, any vast, complex horror, George Steiner wrote of the "sheer incapacity of the 'normal' mind to imagine and hence give active belief to the enormities of the circumstance." Range does journeyman's work in capturing circumstance, but he cannot run as fast as a contemporary headline ticker. Several Chicago actors are recognizable, as are Joel Daly and Walter Jacobson; James Urbaniak ("Henry Fool") is marvelously dry as a forensics tech who will not bend. 97m.

Major theater chains chose to demonstrate their conservatism by not booking the essentially liberties-driven "DOAP"; while Landmark is showing it in some markets, it opens Friday in Chicago at the Music Box..

(2006-10-24)

Also by Ray Pride

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The forty-second edition of the Chicago International Film Festival continues this week at River East, Landmark Century and other locations, drawing from thirty countries and probably just as many festivals earlier in the year
(2006-10-10)

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(2006-10-10)

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Gimme Welter
(2006-10-03)

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(2006-10-03)

Who Would Jesus Kill?
(2006-09-26)

Tip of the Week
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The Last Picture
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Delish
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