Review: The Special Relationship

A moment of URPT (Unresolved Political Tension) outside the White House.

The Special Relationship
Director: Richard Loncraine
Starring: Michael Sheen, Dennis Quaid, Helen McCrory, Hope Davis
Released by: Roadshow

There’s something fascinating – deeply gripping, in fact – about the onscreen illusion of a privileged perspective on important historical events. The ratings bonanza of the recent Hawke biopic shows that, decades after the political machinations in question, audiences want to feel as if they can not just step back in time, but into the party room… although not necessarily into Bob and Blanche’s hotel rooms.

And it’s these backroom dealings we crave as we wilt in the final days of a truly anodyne Federal election campaign. The politicians we see in the media are far less compelling than the flawed individuals who deal, backstab and hunger for power behind closed doors.

Screenwriter Peter Morgan is professionally interested in both this public play of image and rhetoric and the private doubts and frustrations underpinning it. Michael Sheen has now played Tony Blair in three of Morgan’s movies – The Deal, The Queen, and now The Special Relationship. Morgan also wrote Frost/Nixon, in which Sheen embodied talk-show host David Frost, and The Damned United, in which Sheen played doomed Leeds United manager Brian Clough.

Like The Deal, The Special Relationship was made as a telemovie, and there’s a certain small-screen intimacy to it – a focus on small interactions rather than sweeping setpieces or grand emotional outbursts. Morgan and director Richard Loncraine are interested in the way that, for Tony Blair and Bill Clinton during the 1990s, the longstanding “special relationship” between British and American heads of government became an ideological meeting of minds and a personal – if fraught – friendship.

Right from Blair’s first, eye-opening encounter with Third Way politics during a 1994 fact-finding trip to the US, Sheen depicts him as touchingly ordinary, if a tad self-entitled. He’s a decent guy who’s appalled by the slaughter in Northern Ireland and Kosovo. He’s a devout Christian whose loyalties to his pal Bill put him in an uncomfortable moral position during the Monica Lewinsky debacle.

Not quite gal pals: Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory) and Hillary Clinton (Hope Davis).

Basically, he’s just too innocent. We know the real Blair drove a leadership bargain with Gordon Brown that, like Hawke and Keating’s Kirribilli pact, he was later reluctant to honour. He railroaded Parliament in a presidential manner. The Chilcot Inquiry investigated the gung-ho way he committed Britain to participating in the War On Terror. In The Loop took the piss out of his aggressive reliance on spin.

As Clinton, Dennis Quaid is wilier, with a nose for realpolitik garlanded in Southern folksiness. At first I was put off by his lack of physical resemblance to the teddybearish Clinton, but he totally has the voice down. Hope Davis is brilliant as Hillary Clinton: pragmatic, bitingly intelligent but still vulnerable. (Chelsea is nowhere to be seen.)

The film’s domesticity makes these portrayals feel convincing. Tony scrabbles in the laundry hamper for his favourite blue shirt; sad Bill comfort-eats from Tony’s fridge late at night. Hillary makes catty comments about Cherie; later, she listens blearily as Bill wakes her up to confess the whole Monica thing. It all underlines the way that what Blair and Clinton did in private fortified each other’s public behaviour.

Who knows what really influenced them? But the power of fiction is to luxuriate in ‘moments’ where life skates right on by, and to create dramatic ironies from the audience’s knowledge of future fates yet unknown to the characters.

Just as the monarch warned Blair at the end of The Queen, “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Prime Minister,” so Blair naively says of the newly elected George W Bush, “I’m the senior partner now”. Clinton knows better, and he gets to utter an uncannily portentous assessment: “Be careful – these guys, they play rough.”

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