FEATURE FRIDAY | AMERICAN PRESIDENT

FEATURE FRIDAY | AMERICAN PRESIDENT

Welcome to another installment of Feature Friday, in which we share with you some of our favorite Movies & TV shows! This week, American President! When we first were dating one of the things we bonded over was chatting about some of our favorite shows. We’ve found that is the same for a lot of our couples too! So, every now and then, we will showcase a different movie or show and share some of the reasons why we recommend it and the things that we really like about it. So be sure to tune in, check out some of our favorites, and maybe even turn it into a date night with your fiance! Make dinner or order in and tune in to watch one of our favorites.

This week: The American President

There’s something magical about Aaron Sorkin and the White House. For four seasons on The West Wing, the best living television writer on the planet made the Bartlet administration the leaders we all wished we could have. Regardless of your personal politics, watching good people try their hardest to make life better for their fellow Americans was inspirational.

Sorkin gave his seminal TV show a bit of a trial run in the mid-’90s with the release of The American President. Unlike the (usually) happily-married Josiah Bartlet from TV, President Andrew Shepherd is a widower, with the speculation among his political enemies (and some of his friends) being that he had ridden a wave of sympathy into the White House. That sympathy quickly turns sour when he begins dating a lobbyist for an environmental organization, something his opponent in the upcoming election is all too happy to exploit.

Getting this part of it out of the way: the “dirty politics” in this movie seem positively quaint in the modern world. Senator Bob Rumson’s biggest bit of ammunition is a photo of the President’s girlfriend Sydney Wade at a protest in college.

Back to the movie itself, you can see a lot of ideas that Sorkin would later use on TWW, including a plot about a proportional military response (the plot of the second West WIng episode) and a kindly old lady as the Presidential secretary. Of course, there are the Sorkin naming conventions, there’s an AJ here and a CJ on TWW, a MacInerney here and a McGarry there, a Susan Sloan here and a Sloan Sabbith on The Newsroom, a Robin McCall here and a Casey McCall on Sports NIght, not to mention several future West Wing stars like Martin Sheen, Nina Siemaszko, Anna Deavere Smith, and Joshua Malina.

The film really shines when its two leads, Michael Douglas and Annette Bening are on screen together. As great as the supporting cast is, the chemistry between Douglas and Bening is phenomenal. Douglas plays the charming yet vulnerable Shepherd with just the right balance between being roguish and shy, and Bening is every bit the formidable opponent as the President, while still playing the wide-eyed fish out of water on the global scene. The two of them together are electric.

All of that, and we didn’t even mention that this was directed by Rob Reiner, who tends to fly under the radar when great directors are discussed (he tends to get more attention as an actor and activist), but he’s given us Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally…, and Sorkin’s first produced screenplay A Few Good Men.