The thing that made Rob Reiner so interesting as a dominant force in Hollywood, at least for a good 15 to 20 years there, was that you couldn't really pin him down to one kind of movie. Even when you thought his thing was comedies, he'd make complicated comedies, or comedies that crossed over with other genres. But then sometimes he wouldn't make comedies at all. Sometimes he would make horrors, or thrillers, or love stories.
So there was not really a pattern, but there were sometimes familiar interests revisited. His 2016 film LBJ is kind of like the revisitation of two movies he made back-to-back in the mid-1990s, which otherwise will not appear in either of my bi-monthly series, and it reflects an interest on Reiner's part in both presidential politics and civil rights.
The first of those films is 1995's The American President, the fully fictitious story of a widower president (Michael Douglas) who begins dating an environmental lobbyist (Annette Bening). I think of it in the same category as Ivan Reitman's Dave, a film I can very easily see Reiner having directed, though I hold that film in higher esteem.
The second came the very next year in 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi, which was sort of the beginning of the end of Reiner's charmed existence as a director. (North in 1994 ended his run of great films, but he got back on track for at least one more with The American President. Though I personally love 1999's The Story of Us, some people think Reiner never made a really good film again after The American President.) Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, this is the true story of the trial of a white supremacist accused of assassinating civil rights activist Medgar Evers. James Woods plays the white supremacist, and at the time we probably had no idea how good of a fit that was for the right-wing Woods.
In LBJ you kind of get both things coming together. You get a peek behind the closed doors of the highest corridors of power in the U.S., and you also get the civil rights struggle in the form of the 1964 bill that new president Lyndon Baines Johnson reluctantly championed after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (So I guess you also get an assassination in this film, another connection with Mississippi.)
And you know what? I thought it was really good.
I was almost tempted to go all the way up to four stars on LBJ, but cooler heads prevailed and I settled on a 3.5. But it was a generous 3.5, the kind that makes me remind you: this too is a good star rating.
I did end up paying for the movie on AppleTV -- just a rental, not a purchase -- when I forgot I'd written this post, which talked about its availability on Kanopy. Lo and behold, eight years later, it was still available on Kanopy, if only I'd done the usual search of all my streamers before renting it. Fortunately, I'm glad to say that I don't mind having spent my hard-earned cash on LBJ, because I liked it.
The first thing that relieved me was to see a presidential biopic come in at only 98 minutes. Make all the jokes you want about what that says about Johnson and his presidency, but I think it just reflects a different time when the flab was cut from a movie rather than left in. Now granted, this man was president for three years longer than Johnson, but the Ronald Reagan biopic from a couple years ago, which I haven't seen yet, was 141 minutes. At this rate, I can't imagine how long the eventual biopic of Donald Trump will be.
The second thing was that Woody Harrelson did not, in fact, seem ridiculous in all his LBJ makeup. I can see now, having discovered the previous post linked above, that I thought this makeup was quite bad and that it would make the whole movie laughable. Maybe I'm more grown up now than I was eight years ago, because I didn't balk at the makeup at all. (I did wonder if it was necessary to give Jennifer Jason Leigh's Ladybird Johnson a bigger nose, but she's not in it all that much anyway.)
No, this is just a tight little movie that intercuts the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination with events that came before and after it in the life of Johnson, focusing mostly on the civil rights act Kennedy wanted to push through before he was killed, but also dealing with issues like Johnson's own political ambitions, and his desire to create a legacy that was not tarnished by his previous opposition to civil rights measures in his capacity as a congressman and senator.
The casting is good here, with a pair of good actors doing impersonations of Kennedy brothers (Jeffrey Donovan and Michael Stahl-David) and Bill Pullman and Richard Jenkins playing other senators.
One of the things I liked about this was that Reiner was committed to showing the complications in Johnson the man. Even though it's clear Reiner greatly respects the man and what he both accomplished and tried to accomplish, he has no illusions about Johnson being an easy man to get along with, or always on the right side of history. A lot of the moments we see here of Johnson are profane, with the man dropping f-bombs and hanging up the phone on people, both before and after he became president. Ultimately, though, Reiner appears to have believed that Johnson became clear-eyed in his support of the civil rights movement, and there are some really good lines of dialogue and speeches reflecting the man's late-arriving sense of empathy.
It was wise of the film not really to delve into Vietnam, which was Johnson's undoing as president, and the thing that prevented him from running for the presidency a second time in 1968. (You're allowed to complete the term where you started as the vice president and then still run again twice more, as long as you served less than two years as president, I believe. So although he was reelected by a landslide in 1964, he opted out of 1968.) Reiner never really made a war movie, and he wasn't going to start with getting into that part of LBJ's presidency and life.
Reiner did not of course write LBJ, so some of the credit I'm about to give should go to screenwriter Joey Hartstone. But Reiner at his best didn't need a huge amount of celluloid to tell a story that feels pretty in depth. I learned a lot I didn't know about LBJ in this film, and that's a credit to the sort of filmmaker Reiner was at his best.
One final comment about the final thing in LBJ, and this was the second straight movie I watched where watching to the end of the credits revealed something funny I wanted to mention here.
At the end of the credits there was something you see regularly in films, but it was not a message I expected to see in this film:
"The persons and events in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional."
Really? Fictitious? In a film based on historical events and people?
I assume this is one of those situations where you include such a disclaimer because it costs you nothing to do so and because it protects you from the frivolous litigiousness of any wronged party. No one can say "Lyndon Johnson never said that!" because you can just say "It's not Lyndon Johnson. I already told you that. If you think it is, that was unintentional."
But on the face of it, it seems very silly, and on the most basic level seems to suggest that the history being presented here is a lie. I would probably favor:
"Although the people and events in this film are based on real historical people and events, some dramatic license has been taken with the depiction of these people and events." Though the lawyers probably wouldn't be happy with that one.
Reiner's last overtly political film, 2017's Shock and Awe, will be on tap for me in July.
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