AAVR Magazine

With the presidential elections only 3 weeks away, the media landscape is ripe with political debate, and spin, and re-spin. This Friday sees the release of the satirical movie “W”, which comically depicts the life of President Bush. As much as I am looking forward to watching that movie when I get around to it, you can’t help but think about how perfectly timed its release in on October 17th, less than three weeks from the election.

We have come to know President Bush as kind of a cowboy figure from Crawford, Texas. Well, this isn’t true of course. He was born in Connecticut, and later moved to Texas. Before his run for his first in the White House began, he moved to this sleepy little town, and that is where the movie “Crawford” picks up.

In the recent years documentaries seem as though they all have to be one sided, trying to drive home some kind of point. “Crawford”, by David Modigliani, is a breath of fresh air in that sense because it is not trying to drive home an agenda, it is not pro-Bush or anti-Bush. In fact, if it’s pro anything, it’s pro Crawford, Texas. The movie starts and ends with the same person on the screen, an older man who is walking into the town domino hall to play with a couple of friends. The camera stays and watches these senior citizens enjoy the game, and each others company, and answer the questions that are asked of camera by the director, who we never see and only hear once at the very end of the film when he asks a question to merely clarify who the on camera person is talking about.

The film was clearly planned long before this economic crisis, before the war in Iraq, before 9/11 and before Bush was even the president. It shows the good foresight of a good filmmaker who wanted to start following a person early on to see what might happen, and it turns out the foresight paid off. In the beginning moments of this film, we meet Misti Turbeville, and high school History teacher, who points out how Bush moved to Crawford shortly before announcing he was going to run for office to create an image of himself as being from a small town. We later find that many people in the town think Misti is filling the heads on the students with nonsense, and one person even called her a communist. Of course, the man who called her a communist also called CNN a bunch of communists.

One of Misti’s students appears in the film when he was part of the band that played at the first inauguration. Tom Warlick, had of course grown up in Crawford, and didn’t know the opinions of those beyond his town’s borders, and in the clip of him when he was a child he said that he now “feels like a part of the political process.” When the film catches up to today, Tom is sitting in his house talking about his experience when he made the trip to Washington D.C., and saw the protestors there. And then he started talking to them, and he said they made sense to him. He is perhaps one of the few people that change from pro-Bush to anti-Bush in a drastic way throughout the film.

Before Bush moved to town, the economy was slow, and many of the stores on Main Street where closed down. After the arrival of Bush, and his election to the Presidency of the United States, the film shows that the economy began to boom due to tourists. But along with those tourists came the protestors that came to town every time Bush was in town. This is when people in the town began to become annoyed with all the attention. One high school student mentions how she just wants to be able to drive down her own street. But when Bush leaves town, so do the circus of protestors and camera crews alike. And near the end of the film we see that main street is slowing down again as protestors are hurting the pro Bush businesses that sprung up, and one can only imagine that with a decline in popularity, that tourists traveling to the area has also decreased.

The film ends with those old men playing dominos and talking about the high school teacher. She decided to leave town to raise her kids elsewhere, and the old men make comments like “she always kept life looking nice around here” and then he continues “I’ve never seen Bush pick up no trash around here” and they all chuckle. Another makes mention about how well Bush cuts cedar, and another remarks “he cuts real well when the cameras are on”, clearly mocking the fact that Bush is claiming to be a rancher like them.

As a documentary, I think this was a great film. Even though I was watching for it, and trying to figure out where the film maker stood on the issues, I found no bias in this film. It was a fair portrayal of all sides of the story. There were no images used to evoke emotion. The only time the film used any kind of dramatic influence was when they had to talk about how one of the residents if the town, who is in the film, died. Clearly the film maker did not intend for this to happen, but it needed to be dealt with in an appropriate way, and I believe that he did just that.

I give this film Two Thumbs up and recommend that you watch it. And don’t worry about going and having to rent it, because you an watch for free on Hulu.com.