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political poetry
I know that I tend to go all gushy over really rhythmic writing, the sort that dances and twists and turns and executes a perfect triple axel in midair over a giant chasm filled with broken glass. I know I do this even though it’s so five years ago to get all hyped-up over excellent dialogue and rapid-fire conversation. I know. I have to live with this every day, and I’m ashamed. Except not so much, really. Because all I have to do is shout “guilty pleasure!” and I’m granted asylum. Here’s today’s little orgasmic excerpt. I’m hanging out, catching up on random nothings, and in the background The American President is playing. It’s one of those movies you don’t have to actually watch to get, you know, and that’s all due the writer, Aaron Sorkin. Anyway, it’s not a great movie by any stretch, but from time to time it’s compelling, sometimes a little charming, and sometimes almost brilliant. Sorkin can pirouette with the best of em, and a stellar little example of this is the scene in which he cameos as the boy Friday of a congressman. In the scene the President’s boy Friday, Lewis Rothschild (Michael J. Fox) is out beating the streets, trying to count up as many last-minute votes as he can. Sorkin’s nameless character is in a bar with a martini, and Lewis sidles up to him:
Good stuff, and Sorkin delivers his own lines with the sort of aplomb that his future mouthpieces on Sports Night and The West Wing will adapt for their own deliveries. (Sorkin’s lyrical style was never completely captured by the actors who delivered his lines in his movies, including this one and A Few Good Men, which both come close, and Malice, which is almost unidentifiable as Sorkin’s work unless you know better.) In any case, he flummoxes his characters as well as he elevates them, and the two best examples of this are my favorite scenes in the movie. In the first, Lewis is trying to save a vote that the President’s in danger of losing:
It’s a spectacular disintegration by Fox, one of the highlights of the movie. But I’m still partial to this behind-closed-doors moment when the President (Michael Douglas) is shoved into a corner by his chief of staff, A.J. McInerney (Martin Sheen) while they shoot pool:
It’s nice, at this point in the flick, to see the gasbag President finally left speechless — until now he’s simply been a lot of nothing disguised as a wise and erudite man, which isn’t the case at all. And unfortunately the redemptive sequences don’t do a lot to fix this — it’s a case of too little too late, I think. But all the same? there are moments of near-greatness in this movie, and it’s that beautiful dancing dialogue that does it. Good shit, man.
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