Bulworth Directed by Warren Beatty Starring Warren Beatty and Halle Berry A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Season finales for "X-Files," "Simpsons" and "King of the Hill" Art amnesia? By Alyssa Katz Was it rape or was it love? Feminists quarrel with a dreamy French film about a woman painter's life Y E S T E R D A Y The Horse Whisperer Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek Robert Redford's latest is destined for the glue factory (05/14/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Home Movies By Charles Taylor Base man: Tommy Lee Jones towers as the nasty, racist, hateful Ty Cobb (05/12/98) The best of friends By Daniel Mendelsohn Why straight women love gay men (05/11/98) Wilde Reviewed by Carol Lloyd Two new portraits of Oscar Wilde miss the wickedness of his style (05/08/98) Woo By Mary Elizabeth Williams Jada Pinkett Smith stars in this sexy, sunny comedy (05/08/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Why "Rio Bravo" is the Great American Movie (05/05/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

BY CHARLES TAYLOR | How do you give any credit to "Bulworth" without sounding crazy? I'd be lying through my teeth if I suggested that this political satire is anything even partially resembling a good movie. The tone and rhythm are off from the first scene, the direction is chaotic and unfocused, most of the cast is given nothing to do but stand around looking as if they're waiting for a final script, the targets change as quickly as shooting-gallery ducks and as for the movie's bead on those targets -- most of the time it sprays buckshot and still can't get a hit. Next to that recent bit of political tomfoolery, "Wag the Dog," "Bulworth" is an embarrassingly bad picture (it's even more embarrassing when you consider that "Wag the Dog" was shot in 28 days). Everything about "Bulworth" is a blunder. Except its anger. In "Bulworth," Warren Beatty -- who wrote (with Jeremy Pikser), directed, produced and stars in the film -- is venting his disgust with the erosion of difference in American politics. He still believes there's a right and a left, but he sees the two major parties representing only the right. For a liberal to say as much in the current political atmosphere is an act of breaking faith -- to some Democratic stalwarts, an act of betrayal. Certainly the worst result of Kenneth Starr's being let off the leash is the spectacle of an "independent" counsel trying to subvert the democratic process for his own political ends. But the second worst is that President Clinton's predicament has reinforced the idea that criticism of his policies equals giving comfort to the enemy. A blessedly clear-headed Fran Lebowitz appeared on the Charlie Rose show a few months ago and said it was absolutely crucial to democracy that Clinton finish out his term. Then she talked about how revealing (and appalling) it is to listen to Clinton vow to stay on and do the job he was "hired" to do. Clearly, Lebowitz observed, this is a man who doesn't understand the difference between being elected and being hired. "Bulworth" asks, who's doing the hiring? As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive. It rejects the false terms in which both Democrats and Republicans are trying to frame our political discourse. As writer, director and star, Beatty flails all over the screen, but he's also made the only recent political satire that draws blood. Beatty plays Jay Billington Bulworth, an incumbent California senator gearing up for the last weekend before that state's 1996 primary. In his office he watches videotape of his campaign spots during which he comes out against illegal immigrants, welfare and affirmative action. None of this seems to jibe with the photos lining his wall: Bulworth with Bobby Kennedy, Huey Newton, the famous picture of the meeting between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Bulworth is a Democrat who's jumped on the conservative bandwagon to stay in office, and he's sliding into a nervous breakdown. He sits weeping as he watches his TV spots; when his aides arrive for work, he barely acknowledges them, just channel surfs catatonically. The movie is about what happens when Bulworth stops mouthing pre-fab catch phrases and starts being brutally honest with everyone around him. Speaking at a rally held in a South Central Los Angeles church, Bulworth is asked why Washington hasn't followed through on the promises made in the wake of the L.A. riots. "We told you what you wanted to hear and pretty much forgot about it," he says. Asked if he's saying the Democratic Party doesn't care about the African-American community, he answers, "Isn't that obvious?" As the weekend goes on, he spins further and further away from any accepted political behavior. Attending a fund-raiser for a largely Jewish group of show biz contributors, he tells them they're excessively paranoid about Israel. (Closer to home for Beatty, he also wonders aloud how it's possible for so many smart people to produce so many blatantly crappy movies.) At a breakfast with business bigwigs, he tells them they screw the poor and the environment without compunction. Hanging out with a trio of young black women he picked up in South Central, he begins rapping his answers to questions from the press (using copious variations on "fuck"), even dressing in the oversized clothes and knit cap of a hip-hop kid. Bulworth's chief aide (Oliver Platt) has visions of political suicide dancing before his eyes, but Bulworth proceeds, freed from all concerns except not falling back on the same old crap. Beatty is doing something similar. After trying to sell himself to new generations of moviegoers by making a big commercial blockbuster (the pleasant, diddling "Dick Tracy") and a horrendous tear-jerker ("Love Affair"), he seems to have stopped caring what anyone thinks. For a long time now, Beatty has carried an undefinable, touching quality around with him. Sometimes, as in "Heaven Can Wait," that quality has been of his own manufacturing. But the source of what's genuinely affecting about Beatty has been the sight of a big star willing to be so out of touch with the Zeitgeist. In the '60s and '70s Beatty made lousy movies alongside great ones, but he never seemed irrelevant. Then, as the daring of early '70s filmmaking gave way to high concepts and huge budgets, and as the country moved to the right, Beatty didn't move with it. At times he has seemed almost quixotic in his willingness to stick to his principles, as he did with "Reds." That wasn't a very good movie, and it never developed the sweep or the emotional surge an epic has to have, but who else would have dared, at the start of the Reagan years, to make a three-and-a-half-hour saga about the allure of American communism? The political arguments in "Bulworth" may sound depressingly trite -- that corporate money has put both political parties in the pocket of big business, destroying any real differences of principle between them and reducing the whole concept of representative democracy to graft -- but their force comes from their context and their source. Beatty's involvement with Democratic politics has gone on far too long now for it to be mere fashion on his part. Rich celebrities who espouse leftist ideals are almost always targeted as hypocrites, but wouldn't it be easier (and more likely) for them to move to the right? How many (not nearly as rich) people do you know who turned Republican as soon as they got any money? As far as I know, Beatty is the Democrats' only celebrity supporter who has refused to close ranks with the party. Beatty's poison-pen letter carries some weight at a time when people who ought to know better keep insisting that, despite everything -- ending welfare, welshing on his promises on gay rights and then signing the Protection of Marriage act, approving a bill (the Communications Decency Act) that made a mockery of the First Amendment and refusing to endorse a needle exchange program in the face of a public health crisis -- Clinton is still a real alternative to Republicans. The most stinging scene in "Bulworth" is one in which Beatty, in full hip-hop attire, is interviewed on television. He responds to the interviewer -- a young woman indistinguishable from every other quasi-alert, well-groomed anchor -- with an obscenity-laden rap that excoriates one target after another: the widening gap between rich and poor, the refusal to grant free air time to political candidates, the sham of making the poor work at jobs that don't even begin to cover the cost of living. Bulworth works up a full head of steam when he notices that the anchor is getting signals to cut the interview short. "Better cut to a commercial if you want to be here tomorrow," he tells her. Sure, we've all heard these arguments, as well as the ones Bulworth makes later, about how media conglomerates limit the dissemination of views that run contrary to their concerns . But Beatty is saying this in a movie financed and released by Twentieth Century Fox, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, who's known for making his print and television correspondents toe the conservative line. The rage and ridicule Beatty puts into the scene carries it past its crummy timing and slapdash staging. Again, as a piece of moviemaking, "Bulworth" doesn't hold a candle to "Wag the Dog." Barry Levinson's film proceeded from a clever premise and sustained it to the end (even if the laughs stopped coming in the last half hour). It was a witty piece of political satire carried out by a group of very talented jesters. But what, finally, was it saying? That American politics is now managed as if it were a big-budget Hollywood movie. Wowee, stop the presses. "Wag the Dog," for all the talent it deploys, is finally like a naughty dinner guest who knows just how far he can go without getting himself thrown out. And political satire without savagery is finally a comfortable old mutt. None of this makes "Bulworth" a good movie. Beatty doesn't have enough faith to stick to purely political satire. He tosses in subplots about the suicidal Bulworth hiring a hit man to bump him off and a love story that never goes anywhere between Bulworth and a young black woman (Halle Berry, whose smoldering eyes promise to match Beatty's anger if only she were given a real role to play). And he closes the picture with a piece of mawkish masochism that can make you feel like a dupe for giving the film any credit. Not even the movie's politics are fully thought out. Beatty hasn't decided if we're supposed to find Bulworth grotesque or sympathetic, if his truth-telling is a symptom of his breakdown or of mental health. Beatty also can't bring himself to carry his vision of inner city African-American life to its bitter conclusion. He waxes sentimental over Huey Newton and asks where all the black leaders have gone. The answer is staring him in the face, in the person of a drug kingpin (played with quiet magnetism by Don Cheadle). Neither Beatty nor Bulworth can see that this guy, who justifies using kids to run crack by saying he's giving them a chance to make money when they can't get an education in their lousy public schools, is the logical extension of Huey: empowerment as the rationale for one more strutting hustler. As a director, Beatty has made some very handsome films, but he's never really learned the craft of pacing, rhythm and story construction. "Reds," "Heaven Can Wait" and "Dick Tracy" floated along on good will and the talents of the casts Beatty assembled. In "Bulworth," actors like Christine Baranski, Jack Warden, Laurie Metcalf, Richard C. Sarafian and others stand around looking as if they're waiting for someone to write them a part. The direction, at times, suggests someone trying to ape the lifelike bustle of Robert Altman's films without any of Altman's technique. In terms of craft and image, "Bulworth" is a nervous breakdown. Beatty has never made a film as crude or clumsy as this one, and he looks terrible here (on purpose, I'm assuming): unshaven, the lines in his face showing. He's using that to suggest the weariness of a man who's been worrying about the same problems for years only to see them get worse. (There are haunted shots of Beatty's face as he stares at the nighttime ghost towns of South Central L.A., windows and doors covered by iron bars, the only light coming from hovering helicopters.) Some filmmakers distill their craft to the essence of what they want to express. Some, at certain points in their career (Sam Peckinpah in "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" springs to mind), hold the idea of craft in contempt, as just another stricture. The result, as with "Bulworth," is usually wretched, but here, at least, it isn't dead. Beatty is reaching for the feeling evoked by "American Nomad," Steve Erickson's book about the 1996 presidential campaign, especially its startling first sentence: "America wearies of democracy." That line intimates the corrosive spirit of this film, and how, despite its clumsiness, it picks away at your brain. I left the theater thinking Beatty would do better to run for office than to get behind the camera again. SALON | May 15, 1998 Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BUENA VISTA PICTURES | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED