In the months before the election, it became clear that political films were tanking, no matter what attitude they adopted. Dinesh D’Souza’s right-wing Vindicating Trump died a grisly death, as did The Apprentice, a drama with a liberal perspective based on young Trump’s toxic relationship with his mentor, the notoriously corrupt attorney Roy Cohn.
Even when a film’s take on politics was quite general, audiences weren’t having any of it. Rumours, a bleak Guy Maddin horror-comedy about political ineptitude involving zombies overrunning the annual G7 meeting, hardly seemed to register with audiences and quickly disappeared from theaters.
One rare moviegoer who sought out Rumours, pursuing “levity” to counter her mounting preelection dread, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “There’s No Escape at the Movies.” The reviewer, Pamela Paul, lamented that Rumours only aggravated her anxieties with its premise establishing the utter incompetence of world leaders “gathered to write the draft of a provisional statement addressing an unidentified global crisis, with the sort of weak-kneed indecision that surely created the crisis in the first place.” Needless to say, these bumbling and self-interested elites are no match for “an onslaught of immediate challenges, which include menacing, zombified bog bodies.”
In the same review, Paul mentions that she also tried out Conclave, thinking a mystery thriller set in the Vatican about cutthroat backroom machinations among cardinals selecting a new pope would make good escapist fare. Instead, she encountered a film tailor-made to remind audiences of the presidential election then underway: Conclave concerns vicious politicking on behalf of two candidates, one progressive and the other conservative. “You try to get away and what do you get?” Paul asked. “An acrimonious election between a liberal idealist and a conservative who wants to turn the clock…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
