Bulworth

viewed September 3, 1999 on video

How astounding it is to find Warren Beatty's wet dream fun to watch.  As Senator Jay Billingston Bulworth, Beatty forms his own bully pulpit and spews out, recklessly, his gripes with modern politics, then goes on to fulfill his cross-racial fantasies; and then, after showering his character with approval from a fictionalized public, martyrizes him.  There's a lot to dislike about Beatty's motives, but as an entertainment as well as an example of personal filmmaking, it's irresistible.  It has going for it what almost every movie out there doesn't: a lot of fun behind making the movie that is evident in viewing it, and an earnest desire to make a point -- and not just satirically; through Bulworth, Beatty gives some provocative answers for political and social reform.  When Bulworth offends a party of Hollywood bigwigs by asking them why they produce such crap, it doesn't come off as token self-flagellation; this movie is really trying to be important, and it's earnest ambition is almost enough to redeem itself from the filmmaker's bottomless vanity.

Watching the movie and how marveling at how charismatically it all flows along (until the disastrously nihilistic ending), it's easy to forget how close Beatty could have come to making a fool of himself; but all of his zaniness, from tongue-wagging at a Black rave to rapping his way through debates, is completely in character, and utterly entertaining.  Beatty is relaxed and more fun than he's been in all his previous movies combined.  The bit characters do their roles as typecast; Halle Berry gives a nice speech in the midst of spending two hours looking beautiful as an example of dignified negritude at an idealogical crossroads.  Don Cheadle, according to my brother, wasn't right for his role -- or for the part of Snoopy in Out of Sight; he doesn't have the menacing quality of power that one might demand of the part (I tend to agree with him more on Bulworth).  The movie is all basically a vehicle for Beatty and his ideas, and both are delivered rather tantalizingly. 

I'm glad for a movie that makes me think about politics at a time when I and my generation really could care less about the government, since they seem so ineffectual in our daily matters.  As Beatty would have us believe, this apathy is exactly what big business government wants, so that they can continue screwing us over insurance, health care and who knows what else.  Whether this is true or not is a matter of opinion, and call me a coward, but I'm more interested in the packaging of these ideas as seen in the movie.  It's easy to be swayed to his ideas when the targets of his criticism are portrayed in anything but a favorable light -- and the only people who come off as real in the movie are the ones whose cause he professes to champion.  However, his glorifying of black people brings us no closer to reality, and like everything else, is a sketched out figment of Beatty's liberal outlaw imagination.

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