Beatty's courage?

'Bulworth'

As I write this, Warren Beatty's Bulworth is receiving rave reviews praising its star-writer-director for his courage in telling shocking political truths to his audience. In fact, just as his hero, Senator Jay Bulworth, must first launch himself into a state of frenzy through sleeplessness and self-starvation before dating to denounce big business, so Beatty, some reviewers have suggested, displays a divine madness in making a movie so brazenly political, so unabashedly left-wing.

Well, the movie is political and it is left-wing. But what is the nature of its daring?

The film's main plot device is a not-so-golden oldie that served countless B-movies. The despondent hero, disgusted with himself for betraying his earlier idealism, takes a contract out on his own life so that his family can collect the insurance. Then he undergoes a change of heart and must duck the hired killer (the very same situation of a new Russian movie, A Friend of the Deceased) all the while hanging on to the political courage he found when he had given up on life. Of course, this device is nothing but a springboard for the film's real content: The nature of Senator Bulworth's conversion and its effect on his run for reelection. We are meant to swallow the familiar melodrama for the sake of comedy and political insight.

But as far as comedy goes, Bulworth is pretty much a one-trick pony. Over and over again, the senator says a (supposedly) outrageous thing in public, the camera cuts to some outraged faces, and we in the audience are supposed to start rolling in the aisles. For a few minutes it's a foolproof device because there are easy laughs in seeing people flabber-gasted and stuffed shirts destuffed. But this device gets old fast. In the film's first half, Bulworth's campaign manager (Oliver Platt) is the main candidate for apoplexy. I don't know how many reaction shots there are of Platt with his eyes bulging and his jaw dropping - ten?thirty?fifty? But I do know I quickly got sick of the hapless actor (not his fault really) because he understandably ran out of ways of being flummoxed.

Of course, not just people's reactions to Bulworth's outrageousness but his behavior itself is supposed to be funny. And Beatty's performance, especially in the opening scenes, is one of the better things in the movie. The actor's most abiding quality, his slit-eyed shiftiness and unease, are well employed here as he scans each crowd for his hired assassin and dives for cover every time he hears a car backfire. And he delightfully trashes his own handsomeness and polish when an unexpected question catches him with a mouth stuffed full of canapes. But in the climactic sequences, with the senator dressing as a "homeboy" and adopting rap to pound home political insights, Beatty is uneven. Sometimes he does come on with the lewd aggression of an R. Crumb hero, but at other moments he raps all too cutely, as if he knew the audience would forgive him anything just for being Warren Beatty. When Gene Wilder, in the comedy-thriller Silver Streak, disguised himself as a "homey" under Richard Pryor's tutelage, he was truly funny because he made you feel two things simultaneously: the intense ridiculousness this nervous white-collar Jewish man felt in his new duds, but also his determination to use his hysterical energy in playing this new role. Wilder's frenzied, panic-stricken "whiteness" fueled his badass blackness and the result, aided by Pryor's deadpan reactions, was hilarious. Perhaps because Bulworth's personality is so vaguely drawn before its transformation, the metamorphosis doesn't earn the spontaneous laughs Wilder provoked.

It seems to me that all of Bulworth's "shocking" notions fall into one of two categories:

* Those that don't offend received liberal wisdom, to wit: corporations are run by thugs in business suits; absolutely no politicians care about black citizens; all white cops detest blacks; etc., etc. But politicians and corporations and bigoted cops have been the standard villains of Hollywood movies for the last thirty years. What's so new and shocking about this?

* Initially biting remarks that turn out to be toothless, or at least are defanged before your very eyes, as when the senator makes seemingly anti-Jewish cracks at a Hollywood fundraiser but his aide quite soon reassures the senator (and us) that it's understood that Bulworth was merely playing with the movie moguls' "Jewish paranoia." And though it may seem strong stuff for Warren Beatty to denounce on screen the lousy product they churn out, the Hollywood powers-that-be really don't care about such denunciations on or off the screen, as long as they are making money from their junk.

Likewise, though the senator, addressing a black church congregation, can be snide about African-American support for O.J. Simpson, it turns out that Bulworth not only has the interests of black people at heart but apparently regards them as the source of all wisdom and joy. In fact, the one genuinely offensive element in this film is an unintended one: the patronizing and ultimately dehumanizing way it puts black Americans on a pedestal. Let Bulworth fall for a chick who seems at first to be a gang girl, and she turns out to be (for one scene only!) a genius of sociology and economics, able to rattle off the causes of poverty and urban decay with a speed and fluency that would leave Lester Thurow agog. Let our hero encounter a drug dealer who uses ten-year-olds as his lookouts, and he's soon transfixed by the gangster's apt and humane analysis of ghetto problems which the senator is then able to incorporate within a campaign speech (and before the fade-out, the gangster has become an activist letting his debtors work off what they owe through community service). Let two other black girls who have fallen in with Bulworth's entourage enter a wealthy white Protestant church (a caricature, I think, of Robert Schuller's) during a fundraiser and Beatty seizes the opportunity to spell out his racial mythology: The rich white parishioners are photographed to look like pink mummies and sing spiritlessly, while the black visitors, using gospel-music harmonies, transform their corner of the audience into a pocket of joy. Sentimentality is, among other things, the shadow-brother of bigotry, and, just as feminists object to men placing women on pedestals, I think it's in the cards that a black commentator will sooner or later denounce the racial obsequiousness of Bulworth.

My problem with this movie has nothing to do with Warren Beatty's political stance, since I agree with about 75 percent of what his hero utters. But what sort of movie is it that depends on audience agreement to make its mark? Is such a film to be called satire or simply cheering for the home team? If Bulworth is an example of Hollywood courage, it must be noted that Hollywood courage is an ersatz version of the real thing.