After Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were finally named the president-elect and vice president-elect of the United States, I finally got it right.
Dave is a favorite of mine -- currently my #111 on Flickchart -- but it's a movie I hadn't seen in more than 20 years. It came out in 1993, the year Bill Clinton was sworn into office, becoming the first president I was able to vote for.
It was the first time I was old enough to vote, but not the first time I was old enough to care about presidential politics. With varying degrees of investment, I had agonized through the losses of Walter Mondale and, to a far greater extent, Mike Dukakis, who was not only a democrat, but also the governor of Massachusetts, the state where I grew up. I even remember balloting in my second grade classroom during the 1980 presidential election, when my parents had been supporting third-party candidate John Anderson, though we all ultimately voted (me only as part of the classroom exercise) for Jimmy Carter to try to stave off the onset of the Reagan years.
Clinton's election was also the last time the great state of Georgia went blue -- until this year.
But Dave's release year was not why I selected to watch it Sunday night. It was because a) it's a lovely, feel good, Frank Capra sort of affair, and b) the film's themes specifically relate to our new president-elect.
In that awful first debate this year, Donald Trump did something that I thought seemed cheap even for him. He made fun of the fact that Biden attended the University of Delaware. Biden also earned a law degree from Syracuse, but Trump thought his own graduation from Wharton Business School, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania, gave him the right to make fun of Biden's non-Ivy League education. For all the ways Trump punches down, I didn't figure education would be the low blow he'd choose, considering his own evident deficiencies in that area. But I guess Trump can still surprise us in some ways. Biden refused to be shamed by it, and like most of the things Trump has done over the past four years, he himself came off the worse for it.
It occurred to me that one of Joe Biden's more charming traits is that, like the protagonist in Dave, he's just a regular guy.
Of course, that's not to say he's an outsider. Someone with a nearly 50-year political career could never be described in those terms. But he is, in fact, a hard-working, train-riding middle class guy who doesn't have a daunting intellect, like fellow democratic stalwarts Barack Obama and Bill Clinton before him. The characteristics that qualified him to be president were not his Rhodes Scholar credentials, but rather, a bottomless sense of empathy and a desire to do the right thing.
Kind of like Dave Kovic, the character played by Kevin Kline in Ivan Reitman's film.
As you probably know, the title character is a lookalike for the sitting president, Bill Mitchell (also Kline), who heads up a Washington D.C. temp agency. Dave does Mitchell impersonations at the grand opening of new businesses, and he gets the attention of the secret service when they are looking for a Mitchell double. Mitchell needs the double because he plans to sneak out the back door of a big gala while Dave exits through the front, all to facilitate a tryst with Mitchell's lover (Laura Linney). When he has a massive stroke during their sexual encounter, Mitchell's chief of staff (Frank Langella) quickly develops a scheme for Dave to act as the president while he whips up a scandal for the vice president (Ben Kingsley), all aimed toward installing himself as the new vice president, and eventually, commander-in-chief.
Interestingly, it was echoes of Trump I saw throughout this film, not Biden, in terms of the funny details. I don't want to get sidetracked, but I did take notes so I'll go through them as quickly as I can in one ungainly paragraph. Bill Mitchell is a narcissist; on his only time meeting Dave, he tells him he's a "very handsome man." Bill Mitchell is cruel, laughing at the do-gooder progressive initiatives of his wife. That wife (played by Sigourney Weaver) also hates him, not unlike Melania, and suffers through the knowledge of her husband's infidelities, not unlike Melania. (The theory about the possible Melania double also reminded me of this film's doppelganger themes.) In a bit about Mitchell, Jay Leno asks if he's been "eating too many Happy Meals," which I thought was funny given Trump's love for McDonald's. Speaking of real people, John McLaughlin appears as himself and says Mitchell "is suddenly bounding around the country like a high school track star" -- which might have described the roided-up "20 years younger" Trump. Mitchell throws out the first pitch at an Orioles game, reminding me of Trump's obsession over Anthony Fauci's pitching skills. Lastly, there's Dave's great line when apologizing to congress about the real Mitchell's corruption scandal: "I oughtta care more about you than I do about me."
But I'm tired of talking about Trump.
The imposter Mitchell, an idealistic temp agency administrator with a boyish energy, is the one who's like Biden. Not in experience, but in temperament.
There's a scene where Dave as Mitchell visits a homeless shelter for children, and this scene actually has two notable moments in it. One is that a teacher leads the kids in a little exercise with pictures of a man missing various features, to help them identify those missing parts. The refrain goes "Poor Joe, he doesn't have any" and the kids answer in unison "Eyes." Just a coincidence of course -- as would be everything about a 27-year-old movie -- but I did note it.
The second moment is when Dave finds a little Black boy off to the side, playing by himself rather than participating in this group activity. He's clearly feeling sad so Dave's outsized empathy kicks in. He wanders over to the boy and does a magic trick in which he makes a checker disappear and then pulls it out of his nose. The boy lights up. It made me think of that moment we've all seen where Biden gives a little African American boy his American flag pin, while his proud mother tells the boy this man is "the next president of the United States." That moment could have been staged, but I doubt it. I have the feeling Joe Biden has interactions like this all the time.
That boy's mother was right. On Saturday U.S. time, Sunday Australia time, Joe Biden became the next president of the United States.
And we are all the better for it. He's not going to blow any of us away with his instantly producible references to ancient literature or complicated mathematical theories. He doesn't need to. He just needs to be decent.
It surprised me to confirm just now that Biden will be our first president named Joe. Joseph is a pretty common name in the U.S., but no such person has ever risen to the nation's highest office. There have been four Johns, three Georges, four Bills or Williams and a staggering five Jameses. But until now, no Joe.
It's time.
To paraphrase something Kamala Harris said yesterday, Joe Biden may be the first Joe to become president, but he won't be the last.
At least, I hope, not the last average Joe.
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