The Obama campaign has produced a 17-minute video, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” narrated by Tom Hanks. Post film critic Kyle Smith reviews the trailer, released yesterday.
Who needs Spider-Man, Batman or, um, Ghost Rider? The hottest new trailer for a superhero sfilm stars Barack Obama.
Yesterday the trailer for a 17-minute documentary about the incandescent paragon of glory that is Obama hit the Web. The movie, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” commissioned by Obama for America, is a campaign fund-raising tool meant to restore the full power of the (financial) Force to Obama. In his current incarnation as an actual governing leader, the president has had more difficulty raising money, particularly from Hollywood, than he did four years ago. Then, despite a résumé that read, “Accomplishments yet to be determined,” he was hailed as a transgalactic mythological figure equivalent to Zeus times Apollo plus maybe Harry Potter.
The film’s director, Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” and later made the acclaimed education documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” proves to be the man for the job.
Watching this spectacularly professional and slick trailer, which throbs with an emotional blockbuster-y score and is narrated by multiple-Oscar winner Tom Hanks, makes a conservative rue the right-wing equivalents — those weedy little DIY jobs like the swift-boat vets’ movie and last summer’s wretched pro-Sarah Palin documentary, “Undefeated.” If cinematic propaganda is a gunfight, Republicans can be relied upon to bring a knife to it. Or maybe not even a knife. Toenail clippers?
Yes, Democrats have Tom Hanks, a globally beloved icon who needs to keep building additions to his house to store all the gongs, medals and statuettes. Cheer up, Republicans: We’ve got Stephen Baldwin!
We’ve also got one more small asset: facts. Despite Hanks’ and Guggenheim’s adorably devoted efforts to polish up a tarnished presidency, only 30 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track, the economy is as robust as an asthmatic newborn, people hate the stimulus, the bailouts and the health-care law and Osama bin Laden can’t be assassinated again.
So, lights, cameras, excuses!
“How do we understand this president, and his time in office?” asks Hanks at the outset. Tell us, Tom, tell us! “Do we look at the day’s headlines, or do we remember what we, as a country, have been through?”
Whoa, is Hanks ordering us to pay no attention to those pesky newspapers? Stupid is as stupid does. Anyone who does read the papers will be asking why, if we were in such a calamitous situation, the bounce-back wasn’t stronger, as it has been in all previous modern recessions except the one FDR kept going for a decade. Obama’s Karl Rove, David Axelrod, is filmed saying of an Obama briefing, “What was described in that meeting was an economic crisis beyond anything anybody had imagined,” but does not mention the proposed solution, the stimulus, which isn’t popular, but only because it wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and didn’t work.
Hanks continues, amid Very Seriously Dramatic black and white photos of Obama, “His advisers would ask, ‘Where to begin? Which urgent need would he put first?’ ” Um, filling out his March Madness bracket, naturally! Oh, and health care. “If we don’t do this now, it’ll be a generation before 30 million people have health insurance,” Joe Biden is shown saying. Wait a minute — 10 seconds ago we were having an economic crisis. What’s with the health care? If Germany attacks you, you don’t go after New Zealand. Yet here is where Guggenheim’s skills are especially impressive. He got Joe Biden to get through a sentence without a gaffe, and that is a big f–king deal.
Hurrying on from health care, mainly because 53 percent of Americans oppose it and the rest think it’s unconstitutional anyway, the movie passes along some news: Did you hear Obama got bin Laden? Not the SEALs, not the vast US intelligence apparatus, not 10 years of painstaking waterboard-assisted sleuthing — no. Obama did it. By sitting in a conference room in Washington and uttering two syllables: “OK.” Biden: “As he walked out the room, it dawned on me: He’s ALL ALONE. This is his decision. Nobody is standing there with him.”
But, what decision? This was a multiple-choice test with one answer. Was there another option anyone had in mind? “Nah, let him go. Wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.” Obama claiming credit for getting bin Laden is like Richard Nixon saying he put a man on the moon.
Guggenheim’s movie will be released March 15, and it’ll be picked clean by March 16. Sometimes your leading man turns out to be Harrison Ford, other times he’s Brandon Routh. A better title for this movie would be “An Inconvenient Superman.”