Bulworth
With Beatty, Halle Berry, Oliver Platt, Jack Warden, Paul Sorvino, Don Cheadle, and Amiri Baraka.
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More precisely, Bulworth is about a Democratic senator from California (Beatty), up for reelection in 1996, who is having a nervous breakdown, takes out a contract on himself, and then finds himself blurting out the truth instead of the usual packaged lies during his campaign. He hasn’t slept for days, and after throwing caution to the winds and going off to a hip-hop club with Nina (Halle Berry) and two other young women from South Central LA, he starts parsing out all his public statements in rap, scandalizing his staff and various media people with the form and content of his forthright declarations. Then after flirting with Nina, meeting her family, saving some boys in the hood from a cop beating, and more or less deciding he wants to be black, he concludes that he doesn’t want to get bumped off after all.
On the other hand, Beatty has been storing up plenty of ideas over the years, especially about politics–Reds (1981), his first solo directorial effort, gave us the first taste–and Bulworth releases them in one frenetic gusher. But the plot positioning required to unleash this content breaks up the flow of the discourse into periodic spurts, and the plot itself is such a strenuous affair of crosscutting and shoehorning that it’s no wonder Caro got the political meaning scrambled. It’s as if Beatty decided that not TV in general but channel surfing in particular is the only political forum we have left, so the movie’s a little bit scrambled too: half the time Jay Billington Bulworth is a visionary prophet, the other half he’s a raving lunatic–and it’s not always clear which half is which. Paraphrasing what David Denby writes about most of the recent foreign films he reviews, I’m not sure if the results qualify as serious art (a label Denby reserves for Sistine Chapels like L.A. Confidential), but it sure makes for a rousing entertainment.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.
