Toronto Dispatch. 4.

Forget Brad Pitt, Russell Crowe and even Michael Moore. The most eagerly awaited film at this year's Toronto International Film Festival was Death of a President the British fictional documentary set on October 19, 2007, about the assassination of George W Bush. If you've read press reports that ran in the US during the last two weeks, in which exhibitors who hadn't seen the already-stigmatized film were asked whether they wanted to play it, you might have thought that DOAP, as it's called, was either a cookbook for terrorist killers or the anti-Christ, or both.

It's neither. It's doc-fiction, a dramatic feature that follows the documentary format, except that all the "facts" are made up.

In around 90 minutes, you see a demonstration in the streets of Chicago get out of the government's control - "hatred for Bush" is the term that cops keep using - giving the stunned Secret Service a sense of foreboding if Bush is left too exposed. After a speech to a friendly business crowd on the economy, Bush insists on walking the red carpet to greet people who have been searched for weapons, much to the Secret Service's chagrin. Suddenly two shots hit him in the chest. In the chaos, he's rushed to the hospital, where doctors find that his lung and aorta have been hit. Soon after the feds determine that the shots came from an upper floor on a tall building nearby (sound a bit like the JFK scenario?), and not from the small crowd that Bush greeted, the president dies. President Cheney, from an undisclosed location (sound familiar once again?) takes the reins of power and immediately asks the FBI on the scene to look hard for a Syrian connection.

Presdent Cheney - that's got quite a ring to it. Can you imagine a fictional doc about the assassination of George Bush Sr that left Dan Quayle as president?

This is not your American TV network docudrama. I can't imagine that an American network in these days of Couric-corporate media control would think of such a project, much less dare to show it, even though the theater where the film premiered last night was packed with US distributors who were eyeing DOAP for eventual, perhaps inevitable, delivery to an American audience. It also has cinematic ambitions, mixing ersatz news footage with a tactile hand-held camera that chafes against the huge crowds and throws you back and forth convincingly between demonstrators and police. All this is inter-cut with surveillance camera images of "suspects" entering or fleeing and "interviews" with officials, law enforcement agents and suspects - all actors, obviously. No stars, obviously. It's sober, rather than apocalyptic. Real Bush footage from Chicago is mixed with computer-generated imagery - just the way Hollywood does it, only cheaply and more believably. The budget was about $2 million. Logistically, it's a hell of a job.

The filmmaker calls the film that he made "in the style of retrospective documentary... a dramatic device looking at how things have changed since 9/11," which may explain the narrative twists that follow the fictional assassination of Bush. In Gabriel Range's story, the FBI agents round up hundreds of suspects, taking over from the Secret Service (who allowed the breach of security by letting the commander-in-chief press the flesh with a select public). They look for Arabic (they say Islamic) names among the employees of the buildings nearby, and soon settle on a Syrian man who visited Afghanistan sometime before the event. They even find a picture him during his military service carrying a gun. Eventually the man is charged, tried, convicted by a jury and sentenced to death, yet certain agents aren't sure that he did it. Another suspect emerges, a black Chicago military veteran with two sons - one killed in Iraq and another, back from the Iraq war, who's first suspected, then cleared - who is found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot. A sniper's rifle is also found. He has a motive, vengeance for the death of his son. This man seems to have been the real killer, but the film ends with the convicted Syrian man still on death row. Is this "Rush to Judgment II," a fictional sequel to the alleged cover-ups in JFK assassination investigations?

In the response to Bush's assassination in DOAP, the story becomes a tale of the broad toll of the fierce US response to 9/11, which leads in the film to stiffer versions of the Patriot Act and, eventually, to  what looks like a cover-up of crucial evidence in the killing by officials who seem to want a man to hang (or fry), and seem to want that man to be a Muslim. Left unexplored are the political implications of a black American presidential assassin. Now there's a sequel for you. As Gabriel Range told his audience after the film was shown, "I was struck by the profound ways that the country seemed to be changing." Indeed. The killing of Bush is eclipsed by the way that the America which Bush shaped deals with that killing.

Is the film anti-Bush? It's anything but celebratory. I can't imagine that Bush has too many friends at Channel 4, which made the film. He certainly doesn't have too many in Toronto, or anywhere in Canada, but there was no applause to the shooting in the film, or at the announcement of Bush's death.

I've heard paranoid reactions suggesting that DOAP, if shown widely, could spawn all sorts of copycat crimes. Who's to say for sure? Like paranoids who never lacked for enemies, killers have never lacked for scenarios for how to do it, and this one seems to have borrowed from the JFK killing for its modus operandi. Should we blame Oswald, or Oliver Stone, or the Warren Commission? If the Secret Service sees DOAP, they'll surely watch these fictional events in the same way that they have scrutinized dozens of films about terrorism in the last five years. But smart criminals tend to be original. And it's probably safe to say that crimes have a better chance of succeeding if they're not following the best-known recipes.

What we probably will see more of is doc-fiction. It's sheer coincidence, but an illuminating one, that Christopher Guest's comedy For Your Consideration screened for press and industry yesterday (Sunday) morning. The Hollywood spoof follows Internet Oscar buzz about an actress's likely nomination for her role as a Jewish mother with Alzheimer's Disease in "Home for Purim" (later renamed "Home for Thanksgiving" by execs who feared it might be too "ethnic"). It's not his best. The dialogue is filled with Jewish jokes that only a Red State audience would consider funny, and its lampooning of showbiz rumors gone wild is softball, rather than hardball - no killer instinct in this one.

Yet Guest has been mocking docs for twenty years, and both films (For Your Consideration and DOAP) are examples of how directors of feature projects are using the documentary format to tell invented stories. (In contrast, United 93 and Bloody Sunday by Paul Greengrass retell history doc-style. So do the two features retelling stories from African politics in this year's TIFF, The Last King of Scotland and Catch a Fire, both commendable for their drama and detail, but not for their invention.)

DOAP is a more ambitious application of the doc-fiction approach on a broader canvas. To make his film believable, Gabriel Range choreographed huge street demonstrations in Chicago that he then filmed with armies of extras. In the discussion after the screening, he hesitated when asked whether his team had told Chicago authorities specifically that their film about a presidential assassination was really a film about the killing of George W Bush. Did he, as we used to say, get away with murder? It's too late to split hairs over that now.

There was plenty of security in staid Toronto during the screening - not in the anticipation that the filmmakers might be attacked or mobbed by adoring Bush-haters, but that DOAP might be filmed illegally from the audience, and then pirated. Then there was a tiff in the house when the security hulks tried to stop a journalist (Baz Bamigboye of the Daily Mail) from taping the discussion after the film on a small tape recorder. Baz, not a guy to be threatened, stood his ground. Fortunately, the filmmakers came in on his side and an embarrassing confrontation bordering on censorship was avoided.

You're left with a "can it happen here?" feeling after seeing DOAP.  Looking at grim footage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader "war on terror," there's enough human error to go around for a hundred film scripts. (Most of them are too comical to inspire anyone but the guys who end up on America's Dumbest Politicians.) Still, the Secret Service answers to the president, as we saw in the film, and this president is far from what anyone would call infallible. The concerns raised by the film about the implications of stiffer versions of the Patriot Act are real enough. Just wait. You'll see the film being used as a weapon in debates by both sides in Congress - that is, if and when it shows in the US. For now, those are the copycat crimes that should concern us.

Posted by dwhudson at September 11, 2006 7:34 AM