Movie Quote of the Day (‘The American President,’ on an Institution No Longer Around)

[Walking with each other before delivering his State of the Union address]

Sydney Ellen Wade [played by Annette Bening]: “How'd you finally do it?”

President Andrew Shepherd [played by Michael Douglas]: “Do what?”

Sydney: “Manage to give a woman flowers and be president at the same time?”

Andrew: “Well, it turns out I've got a rose garden.”— The American President (1995), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner

It’s funny how seeing a movie decades apart can make you look at it in completely different ways. Case in point: The American President, which I viewed shortly after it came out in November 1995 and again yesterday afternoon, at a special Presidents’ Day presentation at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ. (It featured an excellent introduction by Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Pat Schuber on the evolving nature of the Presidency.)

When I heard the above exchange three decades ago, for instance, I groaned at lines so corny that even Frank Capra (such an obvious inspiration for the movie’s creators that he’s even referenced at one point) wouldn’t have served them up.

Yesterday, I groaned for a different reason: the Rose Garden that President Shepherd makes use of no longer exists, in the beloved form that Americans of both major political parties cherished. And all because of one man.

Years ago, I had decidedly mixed feelings about Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, as I did in my few attempts to watch the TV show for which this film was, in effect, a dry run: The West Wing. It raised valid concerns about America’s polarized environment, the microscope under which modern Presidents exist, and the precious lack of personal privacy they enjoy.

But with its bad guys—all Republicans without a single redeeming ideological or social value—it created straw men that his heroes (liberal Democrats) could easily swat away. At least George Bernard Shaw, also given to long speeches in his plays, gave his devils their due, which made rebutting them all the more convincing.

Moreover, Sorkin's heroes possessed few complications, with their real-life inspirations bleached of their flaws when depicted in fictional form. In this film, as a centrist liberal facing a sex scandal promoted by the opposition, Shepherd had clear affinities with the President at the time, Bill Clinton.

Except for this fact: Clinton not only had to issue a false denial that only the most gullible believed about a past affair (with trashy entertainer Gennifer Flowers), but his campaign labored mightily to stamp out entire “bimbo eruptions,” while Shepherd was a lonely widower enchanted by a single intelligent, lovely environmental lobbyist.

Despite these shortcomings, time had raised my opinion of The American President from decidedly mixed to good, if not great. It was even better cast than I had recalled, with Samantha Mathis, John Mahoney and Wendie Malick in interesting supporting roles, and several lines and situations rang with unexpected prescience.

In his climactic speech, for example, Shepherd not only identified the divisive electoral strategy of his rival (an obvious Newt Gingrich stand-in), but the same one employed by the current Oval Office occupant for the last decade: “Whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

And, when Martin Sheen’s chief of staff A. J. MacInerney tells Michael J. Fox’s idealistic aide, “The President doesn't answer to you,” Fox could answer for today’s citizenry outraged by daily lies and civil liberty violations: “Oh, yes he does.…I'm a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it's our responsibility!”

Quote of the Day (Aaron Sorkin, on Why ‘How You Live Matters’)

"How you live matters. You're going to fall down, but the world doesn't care how many times you fall down, as long as it's one fewer than the number of times you get back up."—West Wing/A Few Good Men screenwriter/producer Aaron Sorkin, “Remarks at Syracuse University's 158th Commencement and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry's 115th Commencement,” May 13, 2012 

Quote of the Day (Richard Ford, on Where Writers Get Their Ideas)

"To my mind, not to believe in invention, in our fictive powers, but instead to think that all is traceable, that the rabbit must finally be in the hole waiting, is (because it's dead wrong) a certain recipe for the williwaws of disappointment and a small but needless reproach to mankind's saving capacity to imagine what could be better and, with good hope, then, to seek it."—Richard Ford, "Where Does Writing Come From?" Granta, Summer 1998

Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Richard Ford is irked by the notion that his own imagination had little or nothing to do with the creation of his characters. So, it turns out, is screenwriter-TV producer Aaron Sorkin.

William Glaberson’s article in yesterday’s New York Times reported that four attorneys are claiming to be the real-life inspiration for the character that helped put Sorkin on the entertainment map: military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men.

You can see why they would claim that. What client wouldn’t want his advocate grilling a hostile witness with, “I want the truth”?

Only Sorkin is having none of that, as seen in his disclaimer in an e-mail message to The Times about these claims: “The character of Dan Kaffee in ‘A Few Good Men’ is entirely fictional and was not inspired by any particular individual.”

That sounds like one of those pro forma statements you see at the beginning of novels or end of films. There may be two reasons for this: 1) Sorkin doesn’t want a defamation suit because of a fictional depiction based in reality, as happened when Joe Klein was sued by a Harlem librarian over Primary Colors; 2) he’s annoyed by anything that infringes on his literary autonomy in shaping and reshaping reality to fit his own ends.

I think, more likely, that it is the latter. Like Robert Frost, he believes in telling the truth, but telling it slant.

Or, as Col. Nathan Jessep might put it in A Few Good Men: You can’t handle the truth.