Filed under: Cinematical
There doesn’t seem to be much contention or wiggle-room when arguing about Michael Douglas’best role. ‘Wall Street’s](Wall Street (1987) - Movie | Moviefone)’ Gordon Gekko was greedier than Scarface and did more cocaine than, um, Scarface, and the character remains so enmeshed in the fabric of our culture that this weekend’s sequel feels relevant despite the 23 years that have passed since Oliver Stone’s original was first released (the recent financial meltdown also helps). Sure, Douglas has been reliably memorable in almost everything he’s ever done (this is the part where you list your favorite Douglas performances and then make a lame but essential Catherine Zeta-Jones sex joke), and even his dreck tends to be kind of remarkable in its own right (‘Don’t Say A Word’), but to most people he’ll always be considered Gordon Gekko. Which is a bit of a bummer, because his best role was actually President Andrew Shepherd in ‘The American President](The American President (1995) - Movie | Moviefone)’ (but to spare lots of people yelling at me, let’s just pretend I meant that comment subjectively).
‘The American President’ is what Rob Reiner does with an Aaron Sorkin script, so you can imagine my excitement to see what David Fincher did with one of those things in ‘The Social Network.’ It’s up there with ‘Jerry Maguire’ as one of the very finest romantic comedies of the 1990s (a decade in which the genre received an overdue resurgence of wit and imagination), it’s the prototype for the blissful television series ‘The West Wing,’ and it features Michael Douglas as the most impossibly charming fictional President in the history of American cinema (take that, Gene Hackman in 'Welcome to Mooseport’). ‘The American President’ is the simple love story of a widowed commander-in-chief who falls in love with a whip-smart lobbyist (Annette Bening, never more winning than she is here as Sydney Ellen Wade) during an election year. The man’s got a young daughter and a boatload of anxiously amusing staffers - including Martin Sheen and Michael J. Fox, who delivers a wonderful performance despite clearly suffering from symptoms of his then-announced Parkinson’s - but Sorkin’s script wisely avoids turning Shepherd into a Disney Dad, and instead mines the presidency for its sweetly comic situations and the strains it can put on a good man who simply wants to love someone without all the world’s bull**** getting in the way. The role called for Douglas to channel the natural gravitas inherent to his (father’s) voice into a character who is sweet, debonair, and vulnerable despite being the most powerful man on the planet. Andrew Shepherd (Andy, to me) didn’t require Douglas to do anything he hadn’t done before, it simply required him to do it all at once, and make it sing. And Douglas just nails it.