Very Strange Days
Bill Gates assassinated. George W. Bush elected president. Two films opening the SXSW Film Festival in Austin prompt this reviewer to wonder which of these two events is the more surreal.
Brian Flemming's brilliant opens right off with a would-be headline-grabber that never happened, the assassination of Bill Gates on December 2, 1999. Alexandra Pelosi's hilarious and already controversial , which saw its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, is all about events that actually did happen the following year. George W. Bush did indeed secure the Republican nomination and go on to become elected -- sorta -- President of the United States. Yet is the one with the rooted-in-reality feel to it; is by far the more surreal of the two.
Given the sheer believability of all that follows, it's unfortunate that the opening sequences of Flemming's film ring the least true. Escorted by a motorcade of merely two cops on bikes, Bill Gates's limousine arrives at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Gates -- a double, of course, though he does bear a remarkable similarity -- steps out onto the stage of the amphitheater to hand over one of those giant prop checks to some nominal charity. A shot rings out. Gates is hit in the shoulder. Stunned, his knees start to go, but before he falls, there's another shot. Blood and brain fluid spew from the back of his head. The world's most famous entrepreneur is felled.
Flemming's problems here were obviously budgetary. Anyone who's ever witnessed a formal event starring Bill Gates knows that the crowds would have been several dozen times larger, the police escort beefier, the limo accompanied by two or three more. But never mind. The swirling camera work of shock and disorientation that captures the immediate reaction of the security folk running up to Gates's lifeless body and then pointing up, across the park, to an old hotel from where the assassin's bullets were fired is loyal enough to the ritual we know so well. It's what we flip on CNN for the moment we hear the news.
It's after these first few minutes, his premise established, that Flemming sets off in unexpected directions and begins to tell his story in earnest. This is not a film about Bill Gates or why anyone would want to off him. The motives for the assassination are barely touched on at all. No, the crux of the film is the obsession of a series of beautifully developed and utterly believable characters who abandon what very little they had going on in their lives before to find out what really happened.
The LA police have their version. A lone black man, determined to spark a class war, fired the two shots, fled down the hotel stairwell, and killed a cop before he was ultimately blown away himself. Cut to a man named David James painstakingly reconstructing a detailed model of MacArthur Park and insisting that he doesn't buy it. He founds a group called Citizens For Truth, an "all walks of life" sort of menagerie portrayed by an ensemble of phenomenal improvisers.
Leaving the film, I overheard three separate testimonies that ran something along the lines of, "you know, I was in this pro-feminist/anti-nuke/fill-in-the-blank activist organization once, and it was exactly like that." At the first meeting, you've got to decide whether you'll settle matters by consensus or majority vote. Ok, so what's a majority. 50 percent or 66 percent? If 55 percent vote for the 66 percent majority, now what? There are reports to be filed, goals to specify, personalities to clash, power games to play. The storyline may be predictable enough -- of course it all ends in tears -- but Flemming has done such a knowledgeable and thorough job of probing the group dynamic of that slice of society with a perpetual chip on its shoulder that you can't help but wish you could send a copy as a well-intentioned warning to every activist group you care about.
The venue for the showing, by the way, deserves an honorable mention. The Alamo Drafthouse has ripped out every other row of seats in a conventional movie theater and replaced them with tables. Silent waiters swish among the rows delivering burgers with that charbroiled Texas taste, excellent pizza or one of any number of fine draft beers. A brisk walk up a couple of blocks along Congress Avenue on that same balmy evening takes you to the swanky and historic Paramount Theatre, restored in all its red velvet glory. Approaching the Paramount, the view is dominated by the Texas State Capital jutting up at the end of Congress more proudly, taller, and yes, more aesthetically accomplished than the very US Capital Building in Washington. With the possible exception of the ranch, this was the primarily backdrop of countless reports from Bush HQ throughout November and December 2000 as America tried to sort out who its next president would be. The sight is a jolting reminder: You are in the very heart of Texas. Oil country. Bush country.
People lined up around the block, hoping to get into the premiere showing of Journeys With George. The White House inadvertently gave Pelosi a dash of extra publicity when, so the widely reported rumor goes, it requested to view the film before it was shown to the public, evidently to prep for damage control should Pelosi's tiny handheld digital camera have caught their man acting too unpresidential.
Well, of course, it did. And while Pelosi was right to refuse the request, there isn't much in the film that's going to tarnish Bush's image, at least among Americans and certainly among Texans. To back up, Pelosi, daughter of Democratic Congresswoman (and House Minority Whip) Nancy Pelosi, joined the press corps that followed the Bush campaign from its very first baby steps in Iowa and New Hampshire all the way through the Florida Fiasco to Inauguration Day. Pelosi aptly calls this entourage "The Bubble." While they follow the candidate in leaky planes and creaky buses, reporters from some of the world's top news organizations stuff countless turkey sandwiches and donuts into their faces, listen to the same speech endlessly, all the while cut off from their families, and of course, the people the candidate aims to lead.
As Richard Wolffe, the Financial Times reporter, tells Pelosi's camera, "Most of our time is spent doing really stupid things in stupid places with stupid people." Still, that's part of what makes the snappy-paced 75-minute film so a vastly entertaining and downright funny. The star of the show, of course, and head comedian is George W. Bush, who actually suggests the title for the documentary in one of its very first shots. The candidate has a terrific time poking fun at Pelosi for the brief affair she strikes up with the reporter he calls "Newsweek man," joining the party animals at the back of the plane with a non-alcoholic beer in his hand or making fun of his own mangling of the English language over the PA system. But more worrisome to the White House would probably be the goofball expressions Bush is forever twisting that monkey face of his into for Pelosi's camera.
But oddly enough, though the crowd at the premiere was quite clearly dominated by Democrats who hooted at hollered at the sight of the man who would become president brought back down to all-too-human stature, Bush the overgrown frat boy has an undeniably endearing quality about him that completely eludes those who only know him by what they read in the papers. "In truth," writes Anne S. Lewis in the Austin Chronicle, "the fun-loving 'after-hours' W. that Pelosi shows us won't surprise those who know him personally and tried, usually in vain, during the campaign to explain the appeal to those who didn't get it."
Perhaps the most striking quality Strange and Journeys share is just how much both are rooted in a pre-911 world. Would Flemming dare depict the assassination of Bill Gates so graphically now? And even if he would, surely the police clamp-down that immediately follows, not to mention general public intolerance for skepticism in Ashcroft's America, would be so stifling that you can't help but wonder if a group like Citizens For Truth would even be allowed to pursue its conspiracy theory or flaunt it openly.
And we'll never see that "after-hours" George W. Bush again. As many have pointed out, Bush Junior woke up on the morning of September 12 as Teddy Roosevelt. As he threatens to wield his big nuclear stick, how odd it is to be reminded that buried within the leader of the world's only superpower, there's an inner prankster hoping to party again some day. The Daniel Webster quote that lends Flemming's film its title applies just as well to Pelosi's: "There is nothing so powerful as the truth -- and often nothing so strange."