‘Dave’ on HBO: A President Who Keeps Hope Alive After All These Years

What’s a news junkie to do when the news becomes junk?

I hit my breaking point with the recent release of the “Mueller Report” (or, rather, the completion of a report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller), only to find day after day of talking heads on TV talking and debating a thing without reading any of its hundreds of pages. I couldn’t bear to watch another second of uninformed commentary on cable news.

Then HBO came to the rescue.

Not only do we have the final season of Veep, but we also can enjoy once more the feel-good White House movie of our lifetime, Dave.

I caught up with Dave while scrolling through regular old cable when cable news first broke me, but it’s been on HBO NOW and HBO GO since December for your streaming pleasure whenever you or I demand it. So I’ve watched it again just to make sure my mood hadn’t colored my memories of the 1993 film starring Kevin Kline as a presidential impersonator who finds himself impersonating the president for real. Nope. Dave holds up, and Dave holds us up to “the better angels of our nature” as Americans. Even more so when you worry we may be living through The Manchurian Candidate or The Parallax View instead.

An Ivan Reitman film, released in May 1993 just as President Bill and Hillary Clinton made the White House their home, Dave imagined a similarly philandering president Bill (last name Mitchell) who suffers a stroke during a tryst with a White House staffer. Kline plays both the real prez as well as the titular character, a mild-mannered idealistic guy running a temp agency in D.C. and earning some temp pay of his own by pretending to be President, before the Secret Service discovers him, and the real president’s chief of staff (the inimitably intimidating Frank Langella) and speechwriter (Kevin Dunn, who also plays Selina Meyer’s chief of staff in Veep!) convince Dave to cover for President Mitchell while he’s incapacitated.

Dave’s first questions are so telling.

“What about the vice president?” “Is this legal?”

He may know that he’s in over his head. But the West Wingers also have absolutely no idea what they found when they found Dave.

He’s better than the “real” president, cheering up homeless children, throwing out the first pitch at an Orioles game, cracking jokes with Arnold Schwarzenegger, finding ways to balance the budget, and even win over the First Lady (Sigourney Weaver). Check out what happens when Dave finally realizes his true potential, in his first speech to the assembled White House press corps.

And I haven’t even mentioned how great the supporting cast is here. Ving Rhames, a year before breaking big in Pulp Fiction, brings charm to his role as the president’s primary Secret Service officer. Charles Grodin is in this bringing his best Charles Grodin in even the smallest of supporting characters, as Dave’s co-worker and accountant who helps find hundreds of millions of savings in the budget. Sir Ben Kingsley’s the vice president, banished to Africa for most of the movie. And God bless Bonnie Hunt, making the most of her one 30-second scene as a White House tour guide.

So memorable, I still find myself turning to face my friends on the street or anywhere every once in a while just to say, “We’re walking, we’re walking.”

Actual U.S. Senators and the few talking heads of early 1990s cable news all appear as themselves to weigh in with choice quotes, too, which will remind you of a time when we only thought Republicans and Democrats couldn’t get along, and how far we’ve fallen in terms of our political and journalistic discourse in the past quarter century.

Plus, just to really bake your noodles, this oracle of a film includes an Oliver Stone conspiracy theory, as well as impeachment and pardon jokes from Jay Leno.

In the real world, there’s never an easy solution from our politicians.

But Dave had it all figured out. And still does.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Dave on HBO NOW or HBO GO