At Tribeca: A President to Remember
Filed Under: Film
 A President to Remember
Dir. Robert Drew
Reviewed by Cullen Gallagher
While watching Robert Drew’s latest film about John F. Kennedy, A President To Remember, it is worth remembering Drew’s earliest films (also about Kennedy). When Drew made his debut with Primary back in 1960, he not only helped usher in the American school of cinema verite-style documentaries, he redefined the relationship between politicians and spectators in a way that can never be recaptured. Not content with the standard talking heads of telecast speeches, Drew took his cameras behind the scenes of the Democratic primary candidates Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, filming the back- and on-stage minutiae without any guiding narration. What that film captured, and can never be repeated, is a time when politicians were not yet fully accustomed to performing for the camera: Humphrey comes off as genuinely old fashioned, like a stilted stock character from a 1930s movie, Jackie just seems nervous, while John exudes a leading man’s confidence. All of this lends a certain intimacy to characters, and if the subjects don’t come off as 100% authentic, it’s because they too are unsure of their on-camera persona.
 A President to Remember seems to be the type of documentary that Primary was providing an antidote for. This new film is comprised largely of Kennedy’s telecast speeches, as well as footage from Drew’s four previous Kennedy films, strung together with narration from Alec Baldwin that negates any of the controversies and contentions about Kennedy’s presidency, reducing him to almost picture-book simplicity. The film hardly presents any “perspective” on either the “real” or “mythological” Kennedy at all: instead it is seemingly content with the same inexpressive rhetoric (both cinematic and political) that his earlier films reacted against. Even when Drew reuses sequences from earlier films—such as the highly poeticized Faces of November, a short film about Kennedy’s funeral—he doesn’t come close to touching their original grace.
Saturday, April 26 at 8:30pm; Thursday, May 1 at 4:30pm; Friday, May 2 at 8:30pm; Sunday, May 4 at 1:45pm
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