Second apolitical comedy in the same election year to deal with the wing-spreading of the President's only child, this girl heading west to college, in the footsteps of Chelsea Clinton, while her father campaigns for a second term. The film had the bad fortune to be beaten into the marketplace by Chasing Liberty (similar in theme and treatment right down to an undercover Secret Serviceman as suitor) and the good sense to postpone its release date till the other one had had time to evaporate in the moviegoer's memory. This one is clearly the better of the two, with better attention to circumstantial detail and daily probabilities, and better direction by Forest Whitaker: some deft transitions, in particular, and a covertly clever camera movement that teaches a little lesson in aspect ratios, the camera eye following a furtive couple from a side exit at a movie theater to their seats in the middle of the auditorium, and in the process widening the view of the screen from a cropped square to its full Cinemascope rectangle, transforming the image from a one-shot to a two-shot (more precisely, from Tom Ewell in the passenger seat in The Girl Can't Help It to Jayne Mansfield, too, in the driver's seat). The characterizations on the other hand -- Katie Holmes's title character, Michael Keaton's President, Margaret Colin's First Lady, Marc Blucas's Romantic Interest, Amerie's African-American roommate -- are as featureless and inhuman as crash-test dummies. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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