‘Dave’ Is Partisan Politics

While reading Ronald Brownstein’s commentary, “In ‘Dave,’ the Myth Has a Message” (Calendar, May 18), I felt compelled to respond that, well, gee, I just hated the movie. While I agree that the ideal of the citizen-politician is an enduring American myth, the film--not to mention Brownstein--perpetuates an unhealthy, equally enduring and mass media-sustained myth. The myth of “Dave” is not so much that the ordinary citizen knows more about what is good for this country than our politicians, it is that liberal platitudes and shameless pastiches of “compassion” have any meaning in the face of the real problems in America.

When I saw “Dave” at a sneak preview several weeks ago, I knew two things:

1) The critics would love it.

2) It was so politically correct I could not run out of the theater fast enough.

Never did I imagine, however, the extent of the praise. Surely, I thought, some mainstream critic would expose the absolute humorlessness, the obviousness, the pointed mean-spiritedness. Reminiscent of last year’s “Sneakers,” how can something be a comedy when half the audience sits there feeling not only excluded but actually insulted? Anyway, was I wrong! And to this add Brownstein’s supplementary praise that could only be a press agent’s dream: granting the film an Andrew Jackson-John F. Kennedy-Frank Capra-Ross Perot lineage.

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So, screenwriter Gary Ross is a friend of Brownstein. Well, it turns out Ross is no political virgin. He is a former Capitol Hill intern who was a convention delegate for Ted Kennedy in 1980 and a speech-writer for Michael Dukakis. He currently writes for “Dave,”--er, Bill Clinton--and did so during the campaign. One of Ross’ closest friends, Clinton’s deputy director for personnel Jon Emerson said in the Sunday Times Calendar (in yet another supporting piece for the film): “Gary is very politically astute, but he also had a good sense of the pulse of the people. It’s why his sound bites work and why his movies work.”

Another friend, Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, said, “Gary brings to his films a lot of the hopefulness that Clinton revived in people.” Enough hopefulness to please Brownstein, no doubt.

With no apologies to Frank Capra and Mark Twain, Ross has written an “original” screenplay in which an ordinary Everyman look-alike, Dave, is forced into the presidency through various unsavory plot devices. Fair enough. The President had been shown to be an uncaring, elitist slime-ball (unmistakably meant to be a Republican--more precisely, George Bush). The sinister chief of staff plans to take full advantage of the situation and concocts a scheme to take over the position.

Ross has said he wrote the script in reaction to “the megalomaniacal chief of staffs populating the White House in the recent Republican administrations.” Dave’s decency wins the day, however, with the help of the enlightened First Lady (she’s a homeless advocate so you know she’s OK), and all is well by the somewhat convoluted end of the film. In the context of the film, it is so sickeningly obvious that our Dave is a hero when he promises every single American a job. The First Lady, alas, begins to fall in love with him when he sits on the floor with an African-American boy at a homeless shelter. Big, magnanimous government is what we’re going for here; if the audience buys into the sweetness of that, it buys into the sweetness of “Dave.”

The number of real-life personalities who lent themselves to this enterprise is staggering and was for me a constant reminder of the contentiousness of real-life politics; it was a distraction from the film’s endeavor to be lighthearted and disarming. Journalists John McLaughlin, Helen Thomas (longtime White House correspondent), Chris Matthews, Michael Kinsley, Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, even Nina Totenberg participated, along with politicians Alan Simpson, Howard Metzenbaum, Tip O’Neill and Christopher Dodd. Celebrities such as Jay Leno and Arnold Schwarzenegger are spotted as well.

And director Oliver Stone makes an appearance on “The Larry King Show” in which he satirizes his own obsession with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. How to get into the spirit of this fantasy when repeatedly reminded of real-life earnest political and social battles going on in this country?

I find as a viewer and media observer that I resent Brownstein’s high-falutin’ sustenance of a film so politically motivated, so obviously divisive in tone. I was being preached to, not inspired.

This is partisan politics, pure and simple, not myth-making.