D.O.A.P.
Gabriel Range’s made-for-British-TV piece Death of a President is a clever and audacious piece of work. It is a noncomedic fake documentary; as a matter of semantics is it a “mockumentary”, or is that term reserved exclusively for comedic work? This question was raised at the Cinevegas film festival last year for the screening of Buy It Now. But D.O.A.P. is not much like Buy It Now; it’s more reminiscent of It Happened Here.

Actually while watching D.O.A.P. I kept thinking of Warren Beatty in The Parallax View. But in many ways D.O.A.P. is more subtle than The Parallax View.

D.O.A.P. really is not an indictment of the United States, or of the Bush Administration. The film explores the tensions between justice and politics; in fact the arc of the film can be seen as a battle between justice and politics but it would be wrong to say that politics clearly triumphs. In some ways, the film champions the fairness of the American justice system, even in the face of tremendous political pressure. 9