The American President (1995)

Rob Reiner's 1995 romance of the West Wing arrives from a more innocent era, though perhaps innocence is the wrong word for a film that treats the machinery of Washington as a matchmaking service. Michael Douglas plays the widowed President Andrew Shepherd with a chin-first gravity, and Annette Bening supplies Sydney Ellen Wade, an environmental lobbyist whose carbon-dioxide bill becomes the film's legislative MacGuffin. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, reportedly under chemical duress, and the fingerprints of his later television cathedral are everywhere: the walk-and-talk, the noble staffer, the belief that a well-argued paragraph can move a nation. It is a charming picture. It is also a fantasy of the reasonable center, and it knows it, which is part of the appeal.

The film's mild social consciousness is largely environmental. Wade's crusade against fossil fuels is not decoration; the plot turns on vote counts for a carbon-reduction bill, and the climax commits the president to a twenty percent cut. Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. The cast is white to a degree that would today require a memo, with Anna Deavere Smith's press secretary the lone conspicuous exception. Race is never a subject. Neither is class, capital, or the body, and the romantic engine is still the redemption of a powerful man by a woman who loses her job for the privilege. The script does notice the double standard applied to Wade, and it says so plainly, which earns it a flicker of credit.

Then comes the press room, where Shepherd finally stops being decent and starts being loud. The speech is stirring and it is a sermon, though the congregation is small and the collection plate is a romance. Sorkin's prose does the heavy lifting, as always, and we are asked to believe that eloquence is governance. Thirty years on, the fantasy reads as period piece. Pleasant, well-tailored, and mostly harmless.