Rob Reiner's Arm Moment

The best thing about "The American President"

Rob Reiner’s “The American President”(1995) provokes some intense reactions, which is understandable. It is, perhaps, even more of a bygone liberal fantasy than “The West Wing,” and the specific politics at play in Aaron Sorkin’s openly cracked-out script are inconceivable at best (“I’m gonna get the guns”--wild stuff). This, along with the archaic assertion that the nation would be so uniform in its puritanical morality as to sink a widowed president’s approval rating 25 points in six weeks for casual dating—especially after what we’ve seen in recent years—makes it a dated work of fiction, to say the least.

But I worship this film. I have for twenty years. Because I adore sweeping romance and Annette Bening (as Sydney Ellen Wade) being extremely seductive wearing only a man’s dress shirt. Sometimes I will place my bent finger in front of my forehead, and have it bob up and down while saying “he bought me a ham!” to imitate Sydney’s singular sentient hairstyle in this film, and other times I’ll just simply say the words, “Sydney Ellen Wade,” in the growl of Michael Douglas to myself for no other reason than that it’s really fun to say.

But, to the point: the movie’s key tension, and the reason it works comedically, is because you’re constantly feeling the strain of Andrew Shepherd’s desperation to be a regular joe asking a girl for a date before he’s inevitably sabotaged in his efforts by a helicopter picking him up or something like that. And look, Bening and Douglas do their thing and it’s glorious.

But — and this is where Rob Reiner comes in, and this is where the director’s job of making Image A plus Image B equals Thought C equals Emotion D comes in, and this is where filmmaking actually happens — there is a tiny moment during Sydney Ellen Wade and Andrew Shepherd’s very officious, very diagetically scored first dance at a state dinner when Rob Reiner makes the whole movie work on an emotional level, and it doesn’t involve Michael Douglas or Annette Bening at all.

Martin Sheen and Gail Strickland, who play Chief of Staff MacInerney and his wife Esther, sit watching this spectacle, and, as written in Sorkin’s typographic ode to cocaine, they’re “holding hands smiling as they watch their old friend.” But in the film, Strickland and Sheen’s eyes are locked on Shepherd, and Strickland crawls her hand up Sheen’s back and rests it on his shoulder. It is, in a movie of manners, a oddly intimate moment between spouses that is tonally out of place.

But it communicates a whole history—a friendship stretching back thirty years or more "(“you were the best man at my wedding, for crying out loud!”), a harrowing loss (“I’ve loved two women in my life…I lost the first one to cancer”), and, of course, the possibility of connection again. It does more to humanize the character of Andrew Shepherd, from an outside perspective, than do any folksy attempts at courtship (“Wanna grab a doughnut?”) or self-aware Sorkinisms (“She threatened me and I patronized her and we didn’t have anything to eat, but I thought there was a connection.”)

It’s the moment that makes the audience see Andrew Shepherd as normal guy that you can root for as opposed to a politician—a lonely person still reeling from losing his spouse finding love again. Needless to say, it’s all Reiner.

Anyway, it’s been a horrible week, and I’m pretty late with this post, but I just wanted to say how much I love his movies and how much I enjoy thinking about them and watching them, and how his huge stories often turn on tiny moments to get their point across. I love these small miracles in the midst of overwhelming spectacle, and they’re the reason I come back to his movies and the reason I continue to light the candles even after unspeakable tragedy, because it’s the small miracles that help me to remember.

Happy Chanukah—

Tobin