Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
Cinema 21, $8 admission
Feb 22, 9pm

Stefan Forbes
USA 2008
86 min.
Finally, a movie that shows the footage of Portland hardhats heckling George H. W. Bush—and shows why it didn’t matter.

A political cautionary tale and horror story about a man who specialized in political cautionary tales and horror stories: Lee Atwater, the Republican campaign director who mentored Karl Rove, jumpstarted the Bush regime with the Willie Horton ad, and turned the Presidential stump into a game of gutterball. He sold our soul to the devil. At least that’s how this riveting documentary portrays him, and if it’s a bit hyperbolic—well, those are the terms that Atwater, felled precipitously by a brain tumor at the height of his powers, cast himself in. He reinvented the smoky backroom operative as cable-news celebrity, and to anybody who wanted something a little less base from their statesmen, the cynical striver had a ready retort: “Ya’ll a pussy.”

This movie recognizes his scoundrel’s charm, and feeds off it—it is the rejoinder to the GOP that Oliver Stone’s W. didn’t have the nerve to be. They say every man gets the face he deserves. Lee Atwater did, and now he gets the movie he had coming to him.