March 16–23, 2000

movie shorts

Deterrence

A geopolitical thriller set within the confines of a single set, Deterrence hardly feels claustrophobic. Its characters — including Kevin Pollak as incumbent President Emerson, campaigning in Colorado on primary day, 2008 — may be snowbound in a small-town diner, but satellite phones and TV news (not to mention a nuclear "football") offer communication with the world. The chilling truth is that the President, relying on reports from half a world away and the questionable translation of his interpreters, is no more isolated here than he would be in the Oval Office. First-time writer-director Rod Lurie (a film critic by day) gives us a tightly paced, real-time drama that’s smart and politically sophisticated. True, the characters other than Emerson are thinly conceived, when they’re not walking stereotypes. But Pollak is superb as the under-appreciated President whom TV pundits find "not Presidential" because he lacks the proper "physical bearing" (translation: he’s short, squat, and Jewish) and whose own advisors give him little respect. Some of the silences in Lurie’s script are welcome — he gives us only small cues from which to figure out Emerson’s political circumstances and the psychological underpinnings of his strategic decisions. And it’s genuinely unclear which side, if either, Lurie wants us to take on the two questions providing the film’s moral and intellectual grist: Can one truly take up arms to bring peace, and is deterrence — the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction — really an effective way to prevent nuclear war? By setting his action in the near future (instead of some parallel-world present which we’d instantly recognize as fictional), Lurie can extrapolate realistically from current events — so instead of Hollywood villains, mad-eyed terrorists with doomsday bombs, we get the rulers we know from the newspapers and their doomsday bombs. Also starring Timothy Hutton (here channeling Jimmy Stewart) and Sheryl Lee Ralph.

—Stuart Semmel