1998 in Review: "Bulworth"

He's so vain, he probably thinks the plight of Black America is about him

Bulworth is a bizarre film. To a young viewer in 2023, it might seem like the most problematic movie ever made. It’s a political comedy that attempts to hold white liberals accountable for their failures on race through a redemption arc of one of those white liberals that sidelines and trivializes its Black characters. A white savior movie that critiques white saviors. Warren Beatty raps in it. Terribly. Oh, and he says the n-word.

Beatty plays Jay Billington Bulworth, a California Senator whose ‘60s idealism has curdled into centrism and is now on the verge of being re-elected to another useless term. The opening scenes finds him watching his own campaign ads, in which he supports welfare reform and an end to affirmative action, and weeping uncontrollably. He is so disappointed with himself that he pays a hitman to assassinate him, while negotiating a $10 million life policy that will benefit his daughter after his death. It’s a deal with the devil, i.e. a smug insurance executive (Paul Sorvino) who offers the policy in exchange for Bulworth’s agreement to kill a health care reform bill. It’s a clever set-up made all the more compelling when Bulworth, liberated by the knowledge of his impending death, shrugs off his ass-kissing responsibilities and begins to simply tell the truth as he sees it. 

Over the course of a fundraising weekend in Los Angeles, he tells the congregants at a Black church that they should “put down the malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife.” He tells a room full of Jewish studio executives that their movies are terrible. After learning of the existence of rap music while chasing Nina (Halle Berry), a woman of mysterious motives, into a South Central after hours club, he insults a room full of his top donors in verse, including the insurance executive he had promised to help. “You can call it single payer, the Canadian way, but only socialized medicine will ever save the day,” he intones. “Let’s hear that dirty word…socialism!”

It’s hardly the point, but his raps are basic as hell, like the Sugar Hill Gang but 15 years later and with no soul. These scenes are, as the kids would say, cringe, not just for Beatty’s awful rhymes and his appropriation of the language of the streets, but for the underlying notion that what Black America needs is another white liberal politician. Spoiler alert, I suppose, but by the end of the film, he has inspired the voters to rise up against the American duopoly, and a gangbanger played by Don Cheadle to quit selling drugs and work harder to uplift his community. Cringe!

It’s worth noting, however, the world that Bulworth was born into. The opening text helpfully explains that the film is set during the 1996 election, when voter turnout dropped to 51.7%, the lowest for a presidential election in 70 years, in part because of the unenviable choice between centrist Bill Clinton and boring Bob Dole. Bulworth echoes this sentiment at a televised debate, when he says, “We got a club. Republicans, Democrats, what’s the difference, your guys, my guys, our guys, us guys.” It reminds me of a line in Zero Effect, released a few months prior: “There aren’t good guys and bad guys. There’s just a bunch…of guys.” It’s a notion of its disaffected moment, when the promise of the Clinton campaign—and really the entire spirit of the ‘60s—had come crashing down in a flurry of centrist policies, including welfare reform and mandatory minimum sentencing. Zero Effect responded to this moment. So did The Big Lebowski, in its way, with a protagonist vaguely connected to the counterculture who has retreated from politics. And so did Bulworth, the only one of these films made by someone who actually lived through the ‘60s and was considered part of the Democratic establishment.

Beatty was one of the few movie stars to actually make an impact on politics besides writing a check. He was part of the inner circle of George McGovern’s unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign to unseat Richard Nixon. He was also heavily involved in the Gary Hart’s 1988 campaign before allegations of the candidate’s martial infidelity forced him to drop out. He was also close friends with the Republican John McCain and even served as a pallbearer at his funeral. It’s understandable that Beatty connected with McCain, the last Republican to get anywhere near the truth. McCain’s Bulworth moment was when he told a racist voter in a 2008 televised town hall that Obama was not a Muslim and was in fact “a good man.” How standards for heroism have changed.

Voters do love a truth-teller, but so few of them ever come around. There was Ross Perot, who in his 1992 campaign spoke with a candor rare to national politics, but he had the benefit of being an outsider. Listening to a member of the Washington establishment, even a fictional one like Bulworth, acknowledge the cesspool of Capitol Hill is more cathartic. In truth, the candidate who most resembles Bulworth is Donald Trump, who rose to the presidency by positioning himself as an antidote to Washington bullshit. His mic drop came in a 2016 debate, when he pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign funders take advantage of the same tax laws that he has used to reduce his federal income tax. It’s a “your guys, my guys” moment that crystallized his appeal to a disillusioned electorate.

At least Bulworth’s ideas were good. Many of them have become more mainstream since the film’s release, although few have come close to becoming policy. Socialized medicine was the central idea of Bernie Sanders’s meteoric 2016 primary campaign. The failures of Democratic politicians on issues affecting Black America got a lot more sunlight during #BlackLivesMatter. Beatty (who also wrote and directed) deserves some credit for putting progressive ideas front and center at a time when they were political suicide. It’s just a shame they get so overshadowed by his own vanity. The closing scene is instructive: Bulworth tells Nina that he’s insecure in their burgeoning romance because he’s much too old for her, plus he’s white, to which she replies, “You’re my [n-word],” and gives him a big smooch in front of the paparazzi. Beatty wants credit for wrestling with America’s complicated racial politics, but, with this final scene, he lets himself off the hook for every one of his hypocrisies. You can’t tell the truth and cover your ass at once. 

If the politics of Bulworth are prescient, and the portrayal of race cringe-worthy, the film gets by for much of its runtime on a free-wheeling comic energy. It’s hard to believe I’ve gotten this far without mentioning the great Oliver Platt, who, as Bulworth’s chief-of-staff Dennis Murphy, captures the spineless opportunism of the Washington careerist with comic glee. Platt, whose father was a diplomat and spent part of his childhood in the District, only slightly exaggerates the near sociopathy of Congressional staffers (trust me, I’ve been in those rooms), and he makes a perfect comic foil for Beatty’s casual anarchy. As Bulworth digs himself into a deeper hole with every campaign stop, Murphy’s persistent assertions that the candidate has “gotten it out of his system” and is going to stick to the script this time become more hilarious. His cocaine-fueled conversation with an enthusiastic (but sober) Larry King is the centerpiece of a brilliant performance, and if that doesn’t pique your interest, you and I don’t live in the same universe.

What’s ultimately most instructive about Bulworth are not the policies its protagonist promotes, but the way it demonstrates the pitfalls of truth-telling without the rigorous self-examination that must go along with it. Forget Bulworth’s tragic end. The real stumbling block here is that the closer a candidate gets to the truth, the clearer his hypocrisies become. It happens to movie stars, too, or at least this particular movie star, who in Bulworth wants credit for saying the right things without any inquisition into his motives.  It’s no surprise Beatty penned a character who suggests a return to “free love” as a means of ending racial discrimination. He is the most famous practitioner of free love in Hollywood history. If you’re going to tell the truth, you have to be prepared for it to be told right back to you.

Next in 1998 Year in Review: “The Truman Show”