THE STORY – Explores the uniquely American tradition of presidential parody, a bold art form that has transformed our perceptions of real-world presidents and politicians for the past 60 years. These iconic impressions have an outsized and lasting impact on American politics that has gone completely unexamined… until now.
THE CAST – Alex Baldwin, Dana Carvey, Chevy Chase, Jim Downey, Will Ferrell, Darrell Hammond, Keegan-Michael Key, Jimmy Kimmel, Kate McKinnon, Jay Pharoah & Maya Rudolph
THE TEAM – Josh Greenbaum (Director) & Peter Funt (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
The American tradition of impersonating the country’s political leaders, though relatively recent, is one of the defining features of our democracy. There are very few other places in the world where comedians regularly stand up in front of the President, make fun of them to their face, and live to tell the tale with no harm done to their careers, as they have done for decades at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The state of American Democracy feels perilous at the moment, with the FCC threatening to revoke licenses and certain television networks actually kowtowing to this administration’s demands. At this point in history, when the American public feels more divided than ever, how has being able to laugh at political comedy both united us and fed the division that threatens to turn our country’s government into a permanent UFC brawl?
Enter Josh Greenbaum’s “Playing POTUS,” a cinematic companion to the book of the same name by Peter Funt. As Funt did, Greenbaum got incredible access, speaking to nearly every major political impressionist of the past few decades: Chevy Chase, Dana Carvey, Will Ferrell, Darrell Hammond, Alec Bladwin, Frank Caliendo, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate McKinnon, and more speak about creating their performances alongside some of the writers (Jim Downey, Al Franken, Robert Smigel) that helped them, as well as political speechwriters and historians who provide larger context. It makes every bit of sense to adapt the book to the visual medium, where audiences can actually watch the impersonators next to the real thing and see where the performers pulled different bits from. This isn’t the type of material that lends itself to anything other than the most straightforward presentation, however, which leads to a repetitive structure: News clips of the President in question, talking-head interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, performance clips, followed by increasingly incensed hand-wringing from the news media.
These kinds of documentaries rely on the personality of the interview subjects, and when your subjects are performers, that’s pretty much taken care of. Every single interview subject here is well-spoken, charismatic, and full of entertaining stories. It’s a pleasure to watch them, especially since they all feel comfortable enough to share their actual feelings about the people they were impersonating, leading to some remarkably candid moments like Ferrell openly wondering if his bro-y impression of George W. Bush helped a man he didn’t like win re-election, or current “Saturday Night Live” cast member James Austin Johnson admitting to calling the veteran Carvey in a panic before his debut as Joe Biden on the show, only for Carvey to say that he didn’t feel good about his George H.W. Bush impression until he’d done it on the show nearly two dozen times.
Entertaining as the interview subjects and their stories are, they also remain frustratingly surface-level, leaving the more serious implications of their work to academics and politicos to explain to the audience, with the aid of archival footage. The film’s ultimate thesis that these impressions often overtake the genuine article in the eyes of the public is as obvious as it is half-assed. The truth is, only certain impressions do that. There’s a reason why people remember Hammond’s Bill Clinton more than Will Sasso’s (also featured in the film), for example, or why people regularly attribute things that Tina Fey said on “SNL” as Sarah Palin to Palin herself, but don’t do the same with Alec Baldwin’s Trump. Delving too much into how comedy works does take a lot of the fun out of it, but there is something of a science to riding the line between going too hard and going too soft, especially in a political minefield, and peeling back that extra layer would have made the film feel genuinely sticky, as opposed to a somewhat insightful nostalgia trip.
There’s great value in “Playing POTUS” and the questions it asks about our society, but it’s so eager to pose those questions that it never fully considers them. Greenbaum treats the film a bit too much like a presidential candidate. His film is as broadly appealing as possible, with a pleasant demeanor and talking points that sound smart. But when you actually look more closely, you find that all those nice words actually didn’t say much of anything at all.
