Greetings again from the darkness. Seeing as many movies as I do each year, the theatre has come to represent a nice air-conditioned respite from the harsh realities of life: paying bills, yard work, bad drivers, politics. Once or twice per year, some filmmaker comes along and messes up my little world of escape. Often it’s Michael Moore. This time it’s Dinesh D’Souza, the President of King’s College in NY and the author of the best-selling conservative tome “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”.
Teaming with co-director John Sullivan, Mr. D’Souza is the on screen presence as narrator and interviewer. His basic premise is that Obama is inordinately influenced by the radical anti-colonialism politics of his father, grandfather and a few other key figures in his past. Obama’s own memoir “Dreams From My Father” is dissected, a few familiar clips are utilized, and a sampling of interviews conducted are meant to prove the theories.
The best and most interesting portion of the film is the beginning, which tracks and pieces together the early years of Obama. We get a brief interview with Obama’s half-brother George who lives in poverty in Kenya. George’s key answer is basically ‘Go ask him’ when questioned on why Obama lets him live like this. For some reason, Dinesh finds it necessary to express the similarities in Obama’s background and his own. Dinesh is an Indian-American educated in the U.S., while Obama is the son of a Kenyon father and was also educated in U.S.
Unlike Michael Moore, Dinesh does offer an impressive lineup of intellectual interviews including Shelby Steele, who makes the point that, in the 2008 election, many white people voted for Obama to “prove” they weren’t racist. The point being, that may not happen again. Of course, there were also those who did not vote for Obama for racial reasons. There is also talk of Obama’s influencer’s including Columbia Professor Edward Said, a known pro-Palestinian scholar, and the infamous (youtube) Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom Dinesh points out is not as crazy as the videos make him out.
The best documentaries introduce us to new subjects or cause us consider a different viewpoint. While I am certainly not an Obama supporter, the only portion of the presentation that really worked for me was the background details. Positioning Obama as an anti-colonialist looking to downsize the U.S. and redistribute wealth to third world countries seems a bit of stretch, and is just not proved here.
One of my concerns with 2008 Barack Obama was the limited background information we received. It seemed every time one of his political influencer’s was discovered, they were immediately cloaked in secrecy and hidden through election date. It seemed as if we knew very little about the man when compared to what we were accustomed to. Dinesh D’Souza took that baton and ran. Unfortunately, his trail of deductions doesn’t seem to add up … but does raise some interesting questions.
Mostly this film will preach to the choir … the anti-Obama establishment. It’s doing very well at the box office, but if Obama supporters ignore it and refuse to offer rebuttal, the political impact should be minimal. A documentary of importance would not use accusations and suppositions to prove its point, but thought provocation is always appreciated.
watch the trailer:
Movie Reviews from the Dark 