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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 00:54 |
The filmmakers essentially adopt a fly-on-the-wall approach, following Franken as he engages in various activities, including a book tour for his best-selling "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them"; the formation of the left-leaning radio station Air America (a subject covered far more extensively in "Left of the Dial"); and most significantly, passionate stumping for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign.
There's no shortage of entertaining material, from Franken's rancorous on-air dust-ups with such right-wing media icons as Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly to numerous clips from his "SNL" tenure, including the now-classic routine in which his character Stuart Smalley attempts to comfort a post-2000 election Al Gore.
The film only sporadically succeeds in providing biographical information or thematic depth, but Franken is such a witty and thoughtful presence that these flaws don't matter greatly. And an emotional resonance of no small impact is reached by the conclusion, in which the depth of his dejection over Bush's re-election is all too obvious.
Although hardly conventional by those standards, "Al Franken: God Spoke" should prove an effective campaign film should its subject decide to run for the U.S. Senate, which he has recently been mulling.
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