Critical Times

THE assassination of U.S. President George Bush has been warmly received ¿ by movie audiences, at least.

The British TV movie Death of a President – a fictionalised account of the killing of George W., has received critical and view acclaim.

It was a popular attraction at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival.

The audience applauded at the end and several more times during a question-and-answer session with the film-makers.

“I really liked it. It seemed very real. It was hard to believe the people were acting. I found myself mesmerised,” said Linda Walsh, a real estate agent from California, who said she is not a Bush supporter.

“I’m always hoping when anything like this comes out that it will cause people that perhaps haven’t thought about things to think about them,” Walsh said. “About the war, about the Patriot Act, about our judicial system.”

Director Gabriel Range told the crowd afterward that he does not believe Death of a President would incite anyone to attempt an assassination.

“I think the film makes it clear it would really be a horrific event. There have been plenty of fictional films about assassinations, so this is not the first in that sense,” said Range, noting that Michael Douglas’s recent secret service thriller The Sentinel opens with footage of the attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life.

“I really don’t think that anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film.”

The movie chronicles a sniper shooting of Bush on October 19, 2007, during a trip to Chicago for a speech on the economy.

It includes interviews with actors playing secret service and FBI officials, White House aides, journalists and anti-war activists, along with suspects and their relatives.

The film plays out like a whodunit on a grand scale, tracing the twists and turns of the investigation against the backdrop of the continuing Iraq war, an expansion of the Patriot Act to give federal authorities greater powers of surveillance, and other fallout from the September 11 attacks.

“It is using the lens of the future to look at the present,” Range told the premiere audience. “It is about issues that have affected us all in the last five years. It is a film about America today.”

The film-makers were at the Toronto festival looking for US distributors.

Death of a President blends archival footage of Bush interspersed with fierce anti-war protests and other fictional scenes crafted by the film-makers.

Actors posing as administration officials and secret service agents were digitally grafted into some images of the president and his entourage.

Bush is struck by two bullets fired by a sniper from a 20th storey window as he is shaking hands with people outside a hotel after his speech. The president dies after surgery at a hospital, and Vice-President Dick Cheney is sworn in.

The rest of the film tracks events over the following months as a Syrian man is put on trial, with the investigation recalling the John F Kennedy assassination as authorities debate whether the suspect was a lone gunman or part of an al-Qaeda conspiracy.

The investigation and the officials behind it come under scrutiny themselves as the case takes a radical turn.

The film-makers said they chose to use Bush rather than substitute a fictitious president to heighten the authenticity.

“The central conceit of the film was that it is a drama, but told in the style of what we hope is a fairly authentic, classic, retrospective documentary,” said producer Simon Finch, who co-wrote the screenplay with Range.

“Clearly, if we had told a retrospective documentary with a fictional president, it would have undermined and undercut that central idea.”