BULWORTH (58)

Directed by: Warren Beatty

Starring: Warren Beatty, Halle Berry, Oliver Platt, Don Cheadle

The Pitch: A US Senator, tired of Life, takes a contract out on himself and dedicates his re-election campaign to telling the sordid truth about American politics.

Theo Sez: How seriously can you take a call to socialism from a millionaire Hollywood player? About as seriously as you take a film where the star is also the director, producer and co-writer but the opening credits are in alphabetical order because hey, he's no better than anyone else - or, come to that, where he pokes fun at his sixtysomething vanity but gets the girl anyway. There's a streak of mendacity running through this undoubtedly intelligent movie, from the insurance-industry nabob who's also gratuitously racist (he's evil, okay?) to the 'hood denizens who leave off talking jive long enough to offer highly articulate analyses of their situation ; fortunately they're also exceptionally sharp analyses, going beyond name-calling and finger-pointing to a wider, vaguely Galbraithian perspective (inner cities rotted by a shrinking economic base, revolution stymied by a controlling consumer culture) - it's the best kind of political film, the kind that transcends political affiliations (Bulworth a Democrat spouting Republican-right rhetoric, which is both a comment on the left's decline and an admission of how meaningless such distinctions have become). One looks forward to the time when Beatty can get out of the Hollywood racket altogether and turn his hand to guerrilla film-making, Melvin Van Peebles-style : certainly, on this evidence, he can't stay where he is. The film, perched uneasily between joyous rant and careful self-deprecation, has the frustrated air of a high-school jock who's read a really great book but can't tell anyone about it without seeming fatally uncool - it lectures then jollies, smiling nervously, trying to look cuddlier than it is. Smart and sumptuous (primary colours burning inside deep, uncompromising blacks), it remains nonetheless a near-miss : hollow, not to say deluded, if Beatty thinks that he (or his character) is truly getting in touch with the disenfranchised, hypocritical if he knows he's not.