Barack Obama: DVD Star

MaryAnn Johanson January 19, 2009

'President Barack Obama: The Man and His Journey'

I don’t wanna be too hard on Barack Obama or on all the many, many people who appear to love him unreservedly, because I get it. I get the hope and the change and the adorable little daughters who’re gonna get a puppy and the awesome kick-ass wife and I really, really get the desire for change after eight years of a president who laughs at the idea of people on death row who’re so not getting a reprieve from him (okay, that happened while he was governor of Texas, but still), and who thinks Dick Cheney is cool, and who invites bad guys to bring it on.

I get it.

But I’m that worst kind of cynic: I’m an idealist who’s been disappointed too many times. So while I’d like to believe that immediately after Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States we’re all gonna get puppies and tax cuts and rainbows, I can’t help but suspect that he’s gonna be just another politician who’ll disappoint us, because we’re not multinational corporations who’ve paid him to look after our interests. I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong, but until that happens … well, I can’t help but look askance at a “documentary” like President Barack Obama: The Man and His Journey: Collector’s Edition, new from Vivendi Entertainment, because it’s all flags waving and soft focuses and comparing the man to FDR, JFK, and MLK before he’s even taken office. (There’s a likening to Reagan too — do they really wanna go there?) Seriously, we’re told here that Obama will “go down in eight years as one of the greatest presidents in the history of this country. His name will go down with … Jefferson, Lincoln … ” Jeez, at least give him a chance to actually move his crap into the Oval Office!

There’s a lot of enthusiasm here, and I can respect that, the hunger for change, the appreciation of a man who can interact with rock stars and foreign leaders with equal ease, and I can’t deny I’m a teensy bit excited by the prospect of the first president who gets the internet and is clearly a big ol’ dork about a lot of things that I’m a big ol’ dork about: I mean, Obama is a geek about politics, isn’t he? He really seems to care about stuff that makes other people run screaming from the room. That’s cool. And all the folks who wax enthusiastic about Obama here — campaign volunteers and Harvard law professors and journalists who’ve covered him for years and friends who’ve known him forever — you can’t not like those people, or appreciate the stories they tell.

Actor Blair Underwood, who narrates the film but also appears as an Obama devotee, tells a story about how when he was working on the TV show L.A. Law so many years ago, he was invited to speak to students at Harvard Law School because his character, the wild invention of showrunner Steven Bochco, was supposedly the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and while Underwood was there at Harvard, he encountered Obama as a student, who told Underwood that he (Obama) was, in fact, currently the first black president of the Review.

There’s no doubt, is what I’m saying, that there’s something inspirational and wonderful and all-American about Obama’s story, which we follow here from his torn-up childhood to his principled tenure in the Senate to the elegant presidential campaign he ran. But if Obama isn’t too good to be true, this rah-rah virtual rally makes me, cynic that I am, think that he must be.

On the other hand, Senator Obama Goes to Africa, a DVD from First Run Features that dates back to the early days of the primary campaign, before Obama was anointed as a saint, is a somewhat more nuanced doc that, while it never suggests that the man is anything less than a paragon, also manages not to make the viewer feel as if we’re witnessing a whitewash. Cameras follow Obama and his family as they visit his father’s homeland of Kenya as well as a refugee camp in Chad for escapees from Darfur, Nelson Mandela’s former prisoner cell in South Africa, and other places of import. (In the extras, there’s a bit about their visit to the Masai Mara Game Preserve that is pure beauty and no politics.) Obama’s intelligence and thoughtfulness as he talks with locals about their concerns and what the place is of America’s influence on the world is clear,. The film is a quiet, unforced tribute to his worthiness as a leader.