The rapping white suicidal senator works. Those words are probably in the wrong order. They were enough to put me off Bulworth in 1998, and for years I remembered it as a bad movie with an embarrassing Warren Beatty performance. Watching it again for The Next Reel, I was smiling almost the whole time.
Beatty keeps going long after I would have tried to recover some dignity. His senator has hired somebody to kill him, which relieves him of the need to keep the donors happy. Hearing what he thinks of them in rhyme makes those dinners considerably less comfortable, and I enjoyed that enormously. I also like that Beatty went after his own people. Bulworth is a Democrat who has become very comfortable taking money and being useless. His despair means something coming from a filmmaker who spent years in Democratic politics. And the Hollywood dinner feels like Beatty finally getting to say a few things he’d been holding in at actual dinners.
Fox paid for this. I appreciate that.
The long rap during the television interview is one of my favorite stretches of dialogue in the movie, even with some very strange comedy jammed around it. Then the lights go out during the debate and Vittorio Storaro leaves him backlit, still going. I wanted that shot as my Letterboxd background. It wasn’t available. Storaro keeps changing the room colors so dramatically that Bulworth seems to be walking from one Dr. Seuss book into another. I love the look of this thing.
Oliver Platt gave me an irrational dose of glee. Murphy keeps trying to manage his candidate until he ends up doing cocaine on a dance floor, and Platt makes every stage of the deterioration funny. Then Larry King takes an interest and Murphy discovers that all this apparently disastrous behavior was his own excellent idea. He cannot stop explaining how smart he’s been. I love watching Platt make that adjustment without becoming any less frantic.
Halle Berry’s Nina is involved in the assassination, she’s the romantic reward, and she’s supplying the political education that gives Bulworth something useful to say. Her explanation of what happened when manufacturing left South Central is one of the smartest things in the movie. Bulworth listens and starts using what he’s learned. Meanwhile, we’re waiting to see whether she’s going to kill him or fall in love with him. Andy was willing to let the satire cover some of these arrangements. Berry makes her worth watching, but I kept feeling how much the screenplay needed her to carry.
By the time he’s finally had some sleep and is ready to do something with his life, I want him to give Nina a job. She’s already demonstrated that she understands his constituents better than he does. Bring her onto the staff. Let her write the speeches. That would make me believe he’d learned something. Instead, he sticks his tongue in her mouth. I love kissing. Kissing’s the best. This particular kiss annoys the hell out of me, and having him acknowledge earlier that he’s much older than she is doesn’t help.
Black culture seems to supply Bulworth with instant authenticity, while the people teaching him keep getting pushed aside for his transformation. Don Cheadle is terrific as L.D., and I enjoy his change of heart even while I can see how quickly the movie arranges it after a visit from the senator. I want more time with these people. They’re interesting, and they have lives that ought to matter beyond what Bulworth learns from meeting them.
The kid who gets an apology from a cop says he’s been waiting his whole life for it. He’s barely a teenager. That line absolutely got me, even with Bulworth standing there as the white rescuer who made it possible. Cheadle and Berry do this to me too. I can see what’s convenient about the writing and still enjoy the hell out of watching them.
I told Andy I was ninety-eight percent sold on the ending, which became ninety-seven as we kept talking. By the time Bulworth is shot, the movie has gotten sincere enough that I want him to have a chance. I understand why the insurance lobbyist would come after him. I just worry that the last thing we’re being told is that speaking honestly will get you killed. I wanted him to be able to go on doing it.
Andy brought up my affection for Network, which was rude and entirely fair.
He also found more hope in the hospital shot and Amiri Baraka’s closing address than I did. Bulworth’s death isn’t confirmed. I had read it as fatal, and even knowing the ambiguity is there, I have trouble feeling it. Co-writer Jeremy Pikser had a similar concern about the editing: he wanted the audience left unsure whether Bulworth would survive. I wanted him to walk away. Maybe I’m getting soft. I was having such a good time watching him learn to be useful that I wanted him to get to do it for longer than a weekend.
I had a blast with a movie I was sure I disliked. I bought it for this rewatch, and now I’m going to show it to people.