“The Special Relationship” – Blair Wars, Episode II

Courtesy of a Crikey giveaway, I went along to see a screening of The Special Relationship – a study of the political and personal relationship between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. While it’s a sequel in any strict sense, the screenplay is by Peter Morgan, writer of The Queen, and Michael Sheen and Helen McRory again play Tony and Cherie Blair.

At one level, this film is something of a “bromance”; the relationship of Clinton and Blair is a mix of genuine affection and political calculation, on both sides. But, at least to me, the film is really about Blair, and an attempt to hint at an answer to the great mystery of his time in office: why did a center-left progressive British politician drag his country – and the world – into a disastrous war initiated by a bunch of lunatics from the American hard right? Why did Blair go bad?

There are, as is almost inevitable in such a film, a few clunky attempts to simplify the narrative to squeeze into a reasonable running time. Australian viewers might be particularly amused to learn, for instance, that Blair’s centrist political style emerged immediately after a study trip to the United States in 1992, for instance. But in its depiction of Blair’s relationship with a good president, the film offers some great pointers to how things might have gone so wrong with George W. Bush. And the conclusion features some of the most effective use of archive footage in a feature film since Good Night, and Good Luck.

But (if you’ll pardon the geek analogy) I couldn’t help feeling a little of the same frustration I felt watching Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Not to compare, for a moment, the script, performances, and direction of the two – Sheen is again good as Blair, as is Quaid as Bill Clinton; perhaps the most noticeable turn, however, is Hope Davis as a very convincing Hillary Clinton. However, in that both stories are primarily about well-intentioned leaders who end up joining the dark side, both films have a “mid-point” feel to them – hints of how things might go wrong are all very well, but the real guts of the story is still to come.

All that said, it was an entertaining evening out for a political junkie – immensely better than Hawke, for instance – and we can only hope that Morgan will revisit his favourite character one more time.