The joy of writer Peter Morgan's films about British politics is the seductive plausibility of their imaginative reality. Instead of brimming with vicious cynicism, he's more interested in inventing a human dimension behind the strange public faces of figures such as Blair, Brown, and the royal family. In this film, his third featuring Martin Sheen playing Blair as an over-eager schoolboy, the greatest delight came in the deft (and surprisingly soft) portrayal of his wife Cherie. And yet the limits of the approach are maybe more apparent in this film than in the other two, both of which focused on his earlier career. Morgan takes his script in the right direction - to explore how Blair came to support the neo-conservative policies of Geroge W. Bush (although portraying Bill Clinton as Blair's social democratic conscience is frankly a bit rich). But the absence of any focus on British domestic policy seems a bit limiting. Blair's recently published memoirs indicate that a man who once a popular hero who saved the British Labour party from self-destruction now appears in agreement with the right on more than just foreign policy. And in spite of the attractive thesis of Morgan's story, I don't think that this can be entirely explained in terms of personal chemistry. But it's fun to imagine that it was.
Review of The Special Relationship
