Scene of the Crime

Inside a fake presidential assassination and a real-life horror story.

by Sam Adams

Opening just shy of a year before the assassination of George W. Bush, Death of a President's faux-documentary future shock has less to do with speculation than extrapolation. At the Toronto Film Festival, where it was innocuously slipped into the schedule as DOAP, Gabriel Range's mock-doc was attacked before it was even screened, in part because it was one of the few movies that copy-starved journalists could write about without having seen. Regal Entertainment Group, the country's largest exhibitor, banned the film from its more than 6,000 screens, proclaiming it "inappropriate to depict the future assassination of an American president" (no doubt a long-held if previously untested moral principle).

The movie's premise is undeniably incendiary, enough to raise accusations that Range was glorying in his fictive assassination, even soliciting its real-life analogue. But the movie takes no joy in Bush's death, and the lead-up to it is singularly sobering. As Bush lands in Chicago, 2007, the streets are filled with protesters chanting "Chicago hates Bush!" The president's limousine is attacked by protesters who somehow break through the security cordon, and although Bush makes it to his intended destination, a speech to a group of high-priced fat cats, he is felled by a rifle shot while shaking hands outside the building.

MONSTER IN A BOX: Pedophile ex-priest Oliver O'Grady in Ireland.

If Death is fuzzy on the details of how the best-protected man in the world could be shot dead during a scheduled public appearance, Range is more persuasive in sketching the fury that might conceivably overwhelm those assigned to protect him. More importantly, he does it without taking sides. The violently agitated black-bloc types who surge against the barricades are positively frightening; even if you agree with their cause, you'd want to do it from across the street. Bush's murder comes across not as chickens coming home to roost, but as the work of a wild animal whipped into a rabid heat, and it leaves a sick taste in your mouth. In a way, it's as much an advertisement for allowing Bush to finish out his term as the words "President Cheney."

Death is on less solid ground in its latter half, which essentially consists of a hunt for the president's killer. Several suspects emerge, and each shifts the implied significance of Bush's death. One, naturally, is a protest leader; another, an Arab immigrant. But the movie's climactic surprise is instead a turn toward the expected, a prosaic revelation that squanders its accumulated outrage. Range begins with an outlandish premise and works steadily back toward the center. The post-Bush world looks a lot like the post-9/11 world, only slightly more so. There's even a new Patriot Act, although its details aren't spelled out. Range's intent is clearly to criticize the crackdown on civil liberties and anti-Arab hysteria of the "War on Terror" era, but his critiques are too mild to justify his inflammatory premise. The movie's biggest problem isn't what it imagines, but what it fails to.

If only Amy Berg's Deliver Us from Evil were as bogus. The story of pedophile priest Oliver O'Grady, who was allowed to run amok in a succession of Southern California parishes for more than 20 years, the film is a searing indictment of the Catholic Church. At times, in fact, it's almost too searing. Berg's interviews with O'Grady are as chilling a portrait of a remorseless monster as has ever been put on the screen; after the first time he was caught, in 1976, O'Grady wrote his victim's family an apology letter expressing "friendship and love" for her. The anger of his adult victims likewise burns cold. But their parents, struggling with their own guilt at leaving their children in O'Grady's hands, lash out in white-hot rage, and Berg is a little too eager to let them rail.

A former TV newsmagazine producer, Berg has her facts down cold, and they're plenty outrageous. Monstrous as O'Grady is — and the list of horrors keeps growing longer and more depraved — the movie's true villain might be Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, whom Berg convincingly demonstrates closed ranks around O'Grady rather than expose his horrific behavior, promising parents he'd be expelled from the church, then quietly transferring him to another parish less than an hour's drive away. Men like O'Grady will always exist, but it's those like Mahony who give them immunity.

Deliver Us from Evil is an important film without a doubt, but it's also a deeply troubling one. In her eagerness to condemn the church, Berg sometimes seems guilty of exploiting her subjects' pain, particularly Bob and Maria Jyono, whose daughter, Ann, was molested by O'Grady while he was living in their house. Or, as Bob insists, "She wasn't molested — she was raped!" screaming the last word in a red-faced burst of wrath. No one could judge his anger, but we can judge the way Berg uses it, especially when she allows him to repeat the same formulation in a separate interview. It feels as if Berg, with the kind of instincts that work better for TV than feature film, has simply cut all but the juicy stuff, effectively stripping her subjects of part of their humanity. There's a terrible irony in the fact that O'Grady, rather than any of his victims, is the most well-rounded, fully explored character in the movie.

(sam@citypaper.net)

Death of a President

Directed by Gabriel RangeA Newmarket Films releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Bourse

Deliver Us from Evil

Directed by Amy BergA Lionsgate releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Bourse