You can’t hurry love, and you probably shouldn’t try to rush history, either.
That won’t stop Showtime, the “no limits” network, from trying Sunday, as it premieres “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis,” a docudrama about life inside the Bush administration in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Thanks to Timothy Bottoms – who previously parlayed his eerie resemblance to George W. Bush into the short-lived Comedy Central sitcom “That’s My Bush!” – and some equally apt casting that includes John Cunningham as Donald Rumsfeld, Penny Johnson Jerald (“24”) as Condoleeza Rice, Mary Gordon Murray as Laura Bush and Lawrence Pressman as Dick Cheney, it may be possible to suspend disbelief in a way that most made-for-TV movies based on well-known people don’t let you. Certainly the cutting between news footage and film is deft enough to give purists fits.
Yet for a movie some would argue was probably made too soon, “DC 9/11” feels oddly dated.
Because whether or not you agree with the politics of writer and producer Lionel Chetwynd, who used his Republican connections to get extraordinary access to those at the heart of his White House drama, including President Bush himself, some of the controversies that loomed large then might seem unimportant now.
Sure, it was “news” for an hour or two that Air Force One, with the president aboard, wasn’t immediately headed back to Washington. And maybe there are people who still think that was strange, rather than a reasonable precaution, or who still believe that George W. Bush is merely the puppet of his vice president.
“DC: 9/11” isn’t likely to sway such people, but Chetwynd’s rather wooden script keeps getting snagged on those issues, as if the most important thing to say about the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11 is that the president was in charge. At one point, he even has press secretary Ari Fleischer (Scott Alan Smith) refer to the “Cheney-runs-the-show myth.”
In July, a somewhat combative Chetwynd told reporters in Hollywood that he hoped his film wouldn’t be seen as “a valentine” to the Bush White House, but that’s like saying you can’t imagine that footage of Bush on an aircraft carrier might turn up in a campaign ad at some point.
Some things are, well, just too good to be true.
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DC 9/11: TIME OF CRISIS
8 p.m. EDT Sunday
Showtime
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AP-NY-09-04-03 0949EDT
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