Film Review: Bulworth

Bulworth is a movie I swore I wouldn’t see. I had seen several dozen trailers. It appeared to be no more than a racist mockery of an angry white male spewing whatever he wanted with characteristic impunity. I WAS WRONG!

What a film! This movie is so witty, funny, brilliant, satirical, emotional, and compelling that it simply REQUIRES one to see it. To miss this film is to neglect a raw transfusion of what has become the comical joke on us all, … common sense in politics.

Unlike recent political films like Primary Colors this film, Bulworth explodes on the screen with an agonized view of a man on the edge of requited suicide. I will not tell you what the film is about - I certainly don’t want to spoil it for you, so I will limit my discussion to performances and theme. As we move past the specter of a sitting United States Senator with seemingly everything going for him on the brink of narcissistic self immolation we see his fearless and anecdotal entry into a world he knew nothing of; inner city America. He is forced by a cascade of prearranged comedic circumstances to toss his normal demeanor to the wind just after making a deal with the devil in the form of a contract with a legislative insurance company.

Jay Billington "Bulworth" is startlingly real as he assaults the torrents of peculiarities that are wrong with society and in fact, our world. He makes verbal acclaim to shocking revelations that most of us are asleep at the switch on. Bulworth forces the most unique of protagonist, the world, to see things through the eyes of those who are oppressed but have forgotten their oppression because their misery has become the status quo leaving them unable to even know of their own painful existence.

He, Bulworth begins to learn that the so-called enemy is the result of what he, his club, the Congress, and corporate America have produced over decades of willful and virtual criminal neglect. Bulworth is not a syrupy mixture of a white man with or without a conscience. Bulworth is a mature attack in frank candor of what and where this country is. This movie could not have been made even ten years ago. Produced by maverick studio 20^th Century Fox, this film is cutting edge and a MUST SEE for anyone with a social conscience and a brain.

The movie will impact Blacks for sure, will make some Whites, Jews, Hispanics, and Arabs seethe with ambivalence and cause third world nations to wonder why they’ve willingly accepted a title like "third world" and who exactly is the "second world" and further who gave industrialized nations the right to silently label themselves as "first world nations. It is not a movie about black and white. It is a movie about right and wrong, human and inhuman and the desperate battle secretly waged to insure benign humanistic suppression.

Oh my friends, if you get the impression that this is a serious movie, you are in error. This is a DEADLY serious movie that has cleverly used entertainment as the substrate to induce a well needed dose of social medicine.

Notable performance by Don Cheadle of Rosewood and Picket Fences demonstrates a mature actor now capable of performing ANY role. An entire cast of Black actors you’ve seen all your life in every ethnic television sitcom and blackplotation movie you can think of are in this film. They are not behaving silly, they are behaving in the REAL, touching on every aspect of what is right and wrong with society. Why, this cast of characters even takes on the anecdotal difference between Collard Greens and Kale making a political statement you’d never dream of verifying long held myths like ‘they all look alike’.

This movie was written and directed by Warren Beatty. You won’t believe the power of his performance and direction. His writing makes me ask, "where has this Warren Beatty been all his life?". He could not have come up with this one unless he has been thinking about the theme for a long, long, time. He touches on subjects that no person not indigenous to the ‘hood’ could have come up with. His courage in echoing the themes in the movie is unbelievable. I wish you would all forward this review to all your friends after you’ve seen the movie. If you agree with my review, you must hurry to rescue this movie from the eminent tentacles of the $2 theaters on it’s way to oblivion. This movie has the ability to initiate dialogue that can quell the destructive direction of our nations and maybe, just maybe, change this country to the place it should have been all along.

The film’s language made me wince almost constantly. The "MF" word is used no less than 500 times in the film not to mention it’s first cousin, the "F" and "B" word. But I must say the language is NEVER used gratuitously. It is only used to demonstrate life as it REALLY is. Use of any other language in the situations where it’s used would have been nakedly phony. You must forgive the language and embrace the message. The message is so strong that days after seeing the film you won’t even remember the language.

The soundtrack is moving, inviting, and an appropriate blend of rap, disco, classical, and mood. The cinematography is bright, crisp and uniquely allows you to visually eavesdrop on an event taking place as opposed to merely viewing a film. There is a scene in which two LA police officers confront "Bulworth". The result of that meeting is just as it should have been. It’s justifiably perfect. The little man in all of us will love it.

Finally there’s Halle Berry. What can I say? Yes, she’s beautiful. Yes, she’s sexy. Yes, she’s a lot of things - but what she is most in this movie is a wonderfully sensitive actress with incredible range. Her performance did not focus solely on her physical beauty - it was her mental beauty that caught me off guard. She’s awesome. There is however one scene near the end of the movie in which she proclaims a feeling to Warren Beatty in a way I did not personally appreciate. The scene was intended to bestow a special colloquial knighthood on Beatty but it came off badly and soured - but only for a moment when in the next moment Beatty knocked me out with, a mystery / suspense punch that would rival anything Hitchcock could do.

See the movie. I almost didn’t. It would have been a great regret. "Bulworth" is a movie to see and cherish for it boldness.