1 post tagged “movies”
It's official: as of today Tony Blair is no longer prime minister. In a piece of good timing, writer Peter Morgan was at the San Francisco International Film Festival last month to receive the Kanbar Award, to talk with film critic David Thomson, and to screen The Deal (2003), an account of the rise of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
Both men were elected to parliament in 1983, sharing an office and a desire to reinvigorate the Labour party. Brown had been a lifelong socialist, whereas Blair, as Morgan said, was kind of a freak--it was like he'd taken the wrong door in parliament and ended up on the Labour side. Reportedly, when their mentor John Smith died in 1994, the two men could not agree who should succeed him as head of the Labour party. It was, Morgan said, almost a biblical scenario, the father figure dead and his two heirs in conflict. Then Blair (Jacob?) invited Brown to dinner and promised that if Brown let him become party chief, Brown would be appointed secretary of the treasury, and Blair would step down after a certain term to make way for Brown. Brown agreed--that's the deal of the film's title--but then when the next election came around, Blair chose to run again rather than step aside.
It's more interesting than you might think watching these young politicians learning the ropes and playing off each other, particularly the sharp, ingratiating, and somewhat oily Blair, portrayed by one of my favorite actors, Michael Sheen, who played Blair again in The Queen. After seeing his performances, you can tell why the British public has found Blair alternately appealing and unreliable, prone to what Morgan called, in his conversation with Thomson, "savage opportunism." The Deal has not had an American release, so I can't direct you to Netflix, but you can see a short clip on the SFIFF site. Let's hope there will be more U.S. showings now that Brown's finally getting his turn.
Peter Morgan has had a remarkable run in the past few years. He wrote the screenplays for two of the best films of 2006, The Last King of Scotland (which earned a best actor Oscar for Forest Whitaker) and The Queen (best actress Oscar for Helen Mirren). I was sorry to hear at the festival that The Last King of Scotland had a different ending in which the exiled Amin phoned Nicholas from Jedda, but the producers ran out of money and couldn't shoot the scene. On The Queen, Morgan acknowledged that the movie has come across as a PR flick for "her maj," but he was also very funny on her grandchildren, saying that William and Harry are "like the kids from Columbine with better accents" and that "there's not an animal safe in Scotland." Continuing his run of fine films, this year HBO showed his drama Longford, about an eccentric politician's idealistic and possibly Pyrrhic campaign on behalf of a child murderess. Currently, Morgan's play Frost/Nixon is on Broadway, recently won a Tony for Frank Langella (as Nixon), and is being filmed by Ron Howard for a 2008 release. I recommend all of these works--rent the movies, see the play if you can. Morgan called brotherly rivalry in The Deal biblical, but you could also call his works Shakespearean in how they probe the psychology of power--those who want it, have it, are trying to keep it in their grasp (I can picture Blair as a more PR-friendly Richard III, telling Buckingham/Brown "I am not in the giving vein to-day."). It looks like Morgan's sticking to this rich theme: his next film script is The Other Boleyn Girl, due out December 21.
And there have been talks of making his Blair duo into a trilogy. At the festival, the question arose whether Blair has seen The Deal. According to Morgan, Blair sent him a note saying he hasn't seen the film--here Morgan made a Pinocchio nose gesture and exclaimed "Lie!"--but would be happy to talk about what was right and wrong once he was out of office. Let's hope that happens.
