Smooth, smug, half-smart. That description doesn't just fit Michael Douglas in the title role, but the movie as a whole, a retro romantic comedy that engineers a meet-cute (and a continuing date-cute) between the Democratic widower in the Oval Office and a married-to-career hatchet woman for an environmental lobby. ("I hired a pit bull," growls her disapproving boss, "not a prom queen!") The latter fixes the cinematic co-ordinates for us upon her first visit to the White House: "I'm trying to savor the Capra-esque quality." And sure enough, Annette Bening, as in the equally retro Love Affair, lightens the atmosphere with a Jean Arthur-esque vivacity -- though that effect might be exaggerated by the blockishness of her respective leading men, Douglas here, Beatty there. Rob Reiner, working once again with Aaron Sorkin, the same speechwriter -- or screenwriter rather -- or on second thoughts speechwriter after all -- of his A Few Good Men, is not so much a director as a midway balloon vendor, filling the screen with big heads, filling the heads with hot air. Sometimes these overinflated objects, rubbing up against each other, create some appreciable static; and for a climax one of them is pumped up to unprecedented dimensions -- the music swells, the closeups get closer, the speeches preachier ("America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship"). With Michael J. Fox, Martin Sheen, Richard Dreyfuss. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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