Jeremy Clarke reviews

The American President

Distributed by
Pioneer LDCE

Cat. No: PLFEB 34901

Cert: 15

Running time: 109 minutes

Sides: 2 (CLV)

Year: 1995

Pressing: UK, 1996

Chaptered: YES

Sound: Dolby Surround

Widescreen: 2.35:1

Price: £24.99

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Director:

Rob Reiner

Starring:

Michael Douglas
Annette Bening
Martin Sheen
Michael J. Fox
Anna Deavere Smith
Samantha Mathis
Richard Dreyfuss

A romantic tale ensues when the incumbent (and incidentally Democrat) widowed U.S. President (Douglas) falls for an environmental lobbyist (Bening).

You might think that the potential political conflict between the two opposing forces in the romance would produce sparks, but this possibility is blandly sidestepped by a script which clearly wants to please voters of all persuasions and ends up satisfying none.

Director Reiner began his career with a series of very different but uniformly impressive movies (This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, When Harry Met Sally and others); however, his work of late (A Few Good Men, North) has failed to match that early promise. Unfortunately, The American President is an insubstantial puff piece that does little to buck that recent trend.

Still, it's likeable enough in a mindless sort of way - you do get to see the President discover that attempting a simple task like phoning up a florists and ordering flowers as the President simply engenders disbelief on the part of the florist. Plus, Douglas gets great excuses for abandoning his girlfriend at short notice, e.g. I have to go - we've just been bombed by Libya. Then there's the corny scene where he decides to go slow and she emerges from the bathroom in nothing but a shirt.

Much humour derives from White House episodes with impressive supporting cast of presidential aides (Sheen, Fox, Smith, Mathis) not to mention the subsidiary plot strand with Dreyfuss (curiously uncredited on the sleeve) as a scummy Republican candidate determined to exploit the President’s romantic entanglement for all it's worth.

This very handsome looking movie overall (witness the opening titles, a montage moving over various presidential and state ephemera - portraits, signatures, ornaments, flags, book spines - or the lavish State dinner where Douglas is accompanied by date Bening) which absolutely must be seen in widescreen (no sign at present of VHS release except in pan-and-scan) otherwise you lose tons of visual detail in every other shot (chiefly protagonists who speak from one or other edge of frame).

Good use is made of Dolby Surround - particularly when a helicopter flies unexpectedly from rear to front right and Douglas announces to Bening, "That's my flight". There's a suitably grand orchestral score to boot. All of which means that, while by no means a classic movie, it's extremely well suitedto laserdisc - and looks great!

Somewhat curiously, given Pioneer's usual infrequent and oft lamented (and in some cases altogether absent) chaptering, this disc actually has all the chapter stops you could wish for (fifty eight in total) and in all the right places - could it be that Rob Reiner is a huge advocate of Laserdisc? Great side change as a scene ends with Michael Douglas facing camera as he switches off a TV (showing the adversarial Dreyfuss) with a remote. A much better disc than expected, then, heaps better than the P&S VHS, but let down somewhat by the lightweight movie itself.

Film 3/5
Picture 4/5
Sound 5/5

Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1996.