The Distinguished Gentleman (1992)

rating: *****

the story: A conman runs for congress (stop me if you've heard this one).

review: Wow.  So until I randomly ran across a DVD of it in a library book sale, I'd never heard of The Distinguished Gentleman.  Seems kind of odd.  I mean, it stars Eddie Murphy, one of the best-known comedic actors of the past forty years.  He'd made a considerable splash in the '80s with movies like Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, and Trading Places, and while it's true he went into a box office dry spell in the early '90s, before The Nutty Professor revived his career, I still thought I'd at least knew the stuff in-between.  But apparently not.  There might be a very good reason, and it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the movie itself.

The Distinguished Gentleman was released in theaters in December 1992.  You may recall that the US presidential election had just been held the previous November, and that Bill Clinton won.  It was a highly-publicized political season.  Clinton's popularity surged in part thanks to his appearance playing a saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show, and he was later called "the first black president."  Distinguished Gentleman makes no direct references to Clinton (other than borrowing part of his campaign material evoking H.W. Bush's "read my lips"), but anyone paying attention to the movie will understand how it perfectly evokes Clinton-style politics, and as such, it can be viewed as a criticism of Clinton on the very eave of his presidency.

And yet it's strangely nonpartisan.  Murphy's conman spends the whole movie, in which he quickly wins congressional election based on name recognition alone (he shares a last name with the recently-deceased congressman played by James Garner) and plunges straight into Washington affairs, without once worrying whether anyone is a Democrat or Republican.  The '90s were a period where the feud between the parties hotly intensified.  Aside from probably Air Force One, Hollywood presidents tended to be Democrats in the Clinton years, typified by The American President (which in turn gave birth to The West Wing but perhaps most honestly, Spin City). 

But anyone who began to suspect that politics had become a sort of cynical, get-rich-quick lifestyle might have found Distinguished Gentleman very familiar.  It's just not how people were actually talking about it.  Clinton's most direct satire, Primary Colors, began as a cynical book phenomenon but eventually became a somewhat fawning movie.  But Distinguished Gentleman blows it out of the water.  It's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington for the modern age.

Where Jimmy Stewart plays an irrepressible idealist, Murphy at first has no interest in the job itself, until he begins to see the responsibility he's accepted, and the colleagues who have completely rejected it.  Lane Smith plays his mentor, and in name he evokes Nixon (Smith even played Nixon three years prior, in The Final Days, so it can hardly be considered coincidental), but the story, in an era where Watergate's legacy remains as relevant as ever, never really reflects Nixon himself.  This is called biting satire.

The somewhat anonymous cast includes Chi McBride when he apparently was being billed simply as "Chi."  He remains a hidden treasure wherever he pops up.  The spotlight rests, then, on Murphy, who gets to pull off, instead of his familiar trick of Peter Sellers ubiquity, a number of killer accents, including an MLK impression that if he'd ever turned into a full performance might've totally transformed his career.  But he never mugs for the camera.  This is a fairly straight performance for Murphy, which is probably one of the reasons it's been so easy to overlook.  It's obviously a comedic movie, but its famously spastic star restrains himself.   It's the absurdity of the story that's the source of the humor this time.

And the sad part is that politics remains exactly like this today, making Distinguished Gentleman increasingly relevant material, created at the dawn of an era, dismissed as poorly timed, but in the end, quite timeless.  And well worth rediscovering because of it.