One afternoon last summer, while working a job in a faceless south Dupont office building, I descended the elevator to find dozens of women clustered in the lobby. They were so thickly massed that I couldn’t see past them to the scene of interest, but I could only imagine: The presidential convoy. Marion Barry. The midday shooting of a meter maid.
But, after worming my way through the pulsing mob, I discovered that the actual draw was a very un-Washington one: A full Hollywood film crew, complete with trailers, lights, multiple directors’ chairs, and a tent tenderly shading mammoth trays of food. And Michael Douglas! They were there filming “The Sentinel,” the newest president-related thriller about a plot within the Secret Service to assassinate the top dog (now in theaters around town).
My office building was across from the Mayflower Hotel, where a scene had just been shot. Now a montage was being assembled which required Douglas to endlessly circle in and out of the foyer of my building, which was what had drawn the thicket of ladies downstairs. Inside the crowd, we gossiped about the shoots: Someone heard Kim Basinger was in town! They’d be filming up and down Connecticut all week! And the week after, catch them along the canal in Georgetown!
Needless to say, Douglas, who plays Secret Service Special Agent Pete Garrison in the movie, didn’t stay long in Washington. Most of the film, which I saw two weeks ago, was surely filmed on sets and at other, cheaper locations. And it’s fun to watch for how accurately Hollywood portrayed D.C., an exercise The Washington Post already gleefully undertook: A street sign glimpsed in the movie is white, while we know District street signs are green. When the presidential motorcade screams down the street, cars are traveling alongside it in the opposite direction, while we know its route would be closed. Garrison drives from Camp David to downtown in 20 minutes.
But there’s another side of Washington such movies try — some harder than others — to get right: political Washington. This is a much harder project of representation than physical setting, and so often — if not always — movies and shows about political Washington are shaped by agendas or ideologies. “The West Wing” was widely seen as an imitation of the Clinton White House (Chris Lehman even wrote in the Atlantic Monthly about how the show was a clever effort to revise the Clinton administration’s history). Conservatives love “24” (this paper’s Adam B. Kushner wrote on how “24” supports torture). “Air Force One,” while gimmicky, got into the thorny question of whether we should negotiate with terrorists, and suggested we want our presidents to be kick-butt heroes as well as policy wonks (“Just think of this as ‘Die Hard’ in a suit, with an election coming up,” the San Francisco Examiner’s reviewer said).
“The Sentinel” has an interesting view of Washington politics, too. (Alert: Spoiler ahead, though the movie’s plot twists are obvious enough that you’ll figure them out early on, anyway.) High-level affairs are the fuel that drives events: Pete Garrison (Douglas) is having an affair with the first lady, which allows him to be blackmailed, and to top that off, another agent unfairly pins crimes onGarrison because, we are told, Garrison had an affair with his wife. Apparently, sex is what moves things along in Washington. The movie reveals, too, our confusion about how to think about terrorism and foreign threats: Montages of blood and words scrawled in Arabic flash ominously between scenes, but the foreign villains turn out not to be from the Middle East, but from one of the post-Soviet republics. They seem vaguely Muslim, but not Arab.
And the movie reverses the trends of presidential heroism we saw in “Air Force One” and even “The West Wing:” The president is a minor character (even a “lame duck,” as one reviewer put it); those who surround him that get things done. My mother, with whom I saw the movie, says she believes it’s a good sign for American democracy: Those past movies and shows “set up the president as a kind of warrior king … bordering on a ridiculous feudal worship of the office,” she says, whereas “The Sentinel” sees him as part of a bigger team. I wonder about the sense of ominous terrorist threat that underpins every change in events but can’t be either talked about openly or understood: Maybe “The Sentinel” gets Washington pretty right.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
