Bullworth is stupid, patronizing, insipid and ugly. It is also sincere in its convictions, which makes it at times excruciating to sit through. A movie that pretends to say something by a hack like Patch Adams is easy to attack, since it's so manipulative, but almost as bad when a movie is by somebody who is convinced he has something important to say, but only reiterates timeless clichés. It's hard to believe that a movie this simplistic was made by the same man who made the fascinating and wise Reds, one of the best political films made in America, and that a film this visually grating was made by the visual stylist of Dick Tracy.
Beatty plays Jay Billington Bullworth, a Democratic Senator from California who is running for re-election in 1996. As the film opens, Bullworth is suicidal- he has been forced to abandon all of his 60's idealism and run as a family values conservative to win his party's nomination, let alone re-election. He is so tired of playing the political game that he hires a hitman (Richard Sarafian) to kill him when he hits the campaign trail the following day.
Having nothing to live for, Bullworth doesn't give the old stump speech at a black church and just tells the truth- that big business runs America. Like something out of a bad Frank Capra movie, the surprising but completely expected happens- Bullworth suddenly becomes super-popular. The rest of the film is a series of vignettes as the Senator loosens up and tells it like it is- often by rapping, which Beatty thinks is way funnier than it actually is. Can you believe that by the end, he actually has something to live for?
What is even worse than the story is the movie's politics. It's like a Kucinich supporter who keeps disrupting the Democratic party meeting. Beatty relays a series of left-wing litanies that are so simple it's its sort of a like liberal version of Rush Limbaugh. Every major policy problem facing America today has a simple solution, in Beatty's world. Beatty's argument is, of course, that politics should be free of corruption and big business payola, certainly true but in the DUH category. The movie's treatment of black people is borderline offensive. Every black person in the film is seen as a kind of borderline saint. There is no question that there are racial problems in America, but the movie's Crash-like argument (a lot of white people are racist!) is totally unhelpful.
And there's the style. This film has a garish, MTV style look to it. It's sort of like Beatty was going through a midlife crisis and was trying to prove that he could still be hip, or mod, whatever those young people say nowadays.
Even as I am writing this review I am still in a state of disbelief. How could the guy who made such great and intelligent movies make one this dumb? Beatty obviously wasn't just making this for the money, as he co-wrote and co-produced the film in addition to directing and acting in it, and he is very politically active. I read that Beatty was actually considering a run for the Presidency in 2000 before some very kind people talked him out of it. Judging on the basis of this film, it kind of says something that if he had somehow managed to beat Al Gore for the nomination, George W. Bush would have had the monopoly on ideas in that election.
Bulworth (1998)