Journeys With George, Alexandra Pelosi's documentary about life on George W. Bush's campaign plane might have been a very good film if Pelosi had decided what she wanted to say.
Don't get me wrong, this is not a terrible film. It's worth a look tonight on HBO for the access alone that this 31-year-old former NBC News producer was granted during Bush's campaign. Using a handheld Camcorder, she captured from her seat on the press plane backstage moments that show a Bush most of us do not know.
I wouldn't call any of the moments candid. Bush seems far too savvy to truly let his guard down with any member of the press, especially a self-confessed "liberal Democrat" who happens to be the daughter of Democratic House minority whip Nancy Pelosi. But these moments do show him trying to be friendly with the boys and girls on the campaign bus. And there are enough of these glimpses to leave you with the impression that you know him better - for better or worse.
But, boy, do you have to wade through a lot of self-indulgence from the filmmaker. There are way too many words and pictures showing and telling such monumental things as: how much Pelosi loves purple (right down to her eyeglass frames and the wardrobe she packed), what kind of birthday cakes she received on the press plane, and what guy she thought she might like to get to know better until she found out he was married. It goes on and on until you want to scream, "It's about the president of the United States not you, OK?"
And, after all that wading, at the end of the 76-minute film, you are left asking, "Where's the beef?" Access here does not translate into much insight or wisdom.
Two scenes near the end of the film encapsulate what is right and wrong about Journeys With George. It comes with 60 days left of the campaign.
What's good is that Pelosi has Bush sitting in a plane seat late at night talking into her Camcorder. He's drinking a glass of Buckler's nonalcoholic beer, which he shows to the camera to prove that it's nonalcoholic.
"Do you think you've evolved as a candidate?" Pelosi asks. "I mean, how has your life changed in a year?"
"Well, I'm losing hair, my hair's turning gray," Bush begins, when another reporter sitting next to Bush, Pelosi's best friend in the press corps, says, "Alex, you're losing hair as well."
"Yeah," Pelosi jumps in, saying, "my hair's falling out since I became a vegetable-aryan."
The filmmaker can't resist the chance to show how clever she is, and the moment passes.
The best moment comes when Pelosi is ostracized by her colleagues because of something in a gossip column. Bush comes up to her on the plane, makes a show of talking to her and says, "When they see me talking to you, they are going to act like your friends again. But these people aren't your friends. They can say what they want about me, but at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are."
What Bush says is worth thinking about for a moment or two, but to Pelosi it is only another cue for her to talk about her own feelings - this time about journalism.
"This is the moment that I realized that I have the appetite for journalism, but I don't have the stomach for the cannibalism," she says dramatically.
I am not against the filmmaker-as-participant or even the filmmaker-as-protagonist. I loved Judith Helfand's HBO documentary Blue Vinyl, which is everything Pelosi's Journeys With George tries to be in terms of whimsy and wisdom, but isn't.
In an interview with The Sun in April, Pelosi said motion picture studios were interested in distributing her film in theaters, but that they wanted to take all the film she shot and re-edit it. She said she chose HBO because it would run Journeys With George as it received the film from her, without editing.
There is a lesson here for first-time filmmakers about the way in which editing can be a good thing, especially when your film is so egocentric.
Premiere
What: Journeys With George.
When: Tonight at 9:30
Where: HBO
In brief: Whose journey is the one that matters?