Product Description

Believing his career is over, Senator Jay Bulworth (Beatty) takes out an enormous insurance policy - and a contract on his own life. but his impending death fills him with an outrageous desire to break the rules and tell it like it is.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11113 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-03-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 108 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Jay Bulworth is your typical senator going through a nervous breakdown. The empty speeches, lies, money, and pressure have led him to plan his own assassination on a weekend trip home to California just before the election. However, a cord snaps in him and like Jim Carrey's rambling lawyer in Liar, Liar, Bulworth can only tell the truth. This new freedom turns Bulworth on and he spews the ugly truth about politics: he tells mass media they are as corrupt as insurance companies; lambastes a black church for not having leaders; and riles the Jewish power elite of Hollywood. He enters South Central running away from advisors (including a bemused Oliver Platt) and mixing it up with a potential new girlfriend (Halle Berry) and a local boss (Don Cheadle). He offends across the board, even developing an inherent knack to rap his speeches. And the public loves it. The weekend becomes a clarifying point for Bulworth: he finds a reason to live.

Beatty's rude and relevant comedy is a one-joke movie, but the joke is pretty good. It's a courageous film that is always sharp even though it loses narrative focus. Beatty's hilarious raps are so inspired they deserve repeated viewings. As usual, Beatty surrounds himself with a great crew, Ennio Morricone's music and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography being especially noteworthy. Beatty and Storaro even have the audacity to imitate two very famous photographs in the film's final seconds. The script by Beatty and Jeremy Pikser won the L.A. Film Critics award and was nominated for an Oscar. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
Warren Beatty's fascinating high-wire act (he's the writer, director, producer, and star) is a plutocratic satire about a senator who, during a nervous breakdown, begins to think he can solve the country's ills by becoming a member of the hip-hop nation. It's an audience pleaser, at times funny and irreverent, but its condescending views on race relations and Beatty's annoying political-agenda street rap more often reduce the comedy to the level of polemic. Beatty's best work comes opposite the actors he's surrounded himself with; the performances of Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, and particularly Oliver Platt, as a harried spin-control operative, manage to lift the film above its failed-liberalism treatise. But even though the movie is fun to watch, crass and energetic when it needs to be, it's ultimately as phony and self-absorbed as an old Frank Capra picture. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

THE WORST MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN
I saw this movie on video the year it was released and still I remember how AWFUL it was. Warren Beatty and Halle Berry trashed themselves in this movie.

YIKES! DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY!!

Warren Beatty For President!
Brilliant biting political satire--Beatty nails his character to the cross of truth letting rip a tale that will have you laughing and cheering him every step of the way. As Beatty once remarked, "I'm a traitor to my class." Living up to his word, Beatty shines a light on the corruption that is our status quo. Bulworth is still as relevant today as when it was released over decade ago--see it and see the lies shoveled at us in the mainstream--owned by the rich--media, for what they really are.

Come on, let me hear that dirty word - SOCIALISM!
If you like political comedy, this is THE show for you. Beware, it deals mainly with the politics of the mid-1990s, a time when the Democratic Party was trying to develop a more conservative image to recover votes from the Newt Gingrich army. And who better to play senator Jay Bulworth than Warren Beatty, the same guy who directed REDS and played its American Communist hero?

Basically the idea is this: Democrats are (or WERE as of 1996) taking more and more money from corporations and financial interests in exchange for policies that favored big money over the poor and working class. Senator Bulworth is shown crying in the opening scene, probably in shame and guilt at what he and the Democrats have become. He is so upset that he plots a final effort to extract life insurance money for his family. But then something happens!

Upon visiting a ghetto in the LA area, Bulworth suddenly develops a brutal honesty instead of the "typical politician" double talk. It is then that he undergoes a transformation, shedding his conservative image for a crass and unabashedly leftist series of rants (and he takes up freestyle rap to deliver the message). Basically he says: Politics is dominated by big money, the Democrats have betrayed the little guy, and it's time for a new grassroots movement. He makes sure to show some support for campaign finance reform and single payer health care (hence the dirty word, "socialism." I wonder if Beatty had fond memories of Jack Reed and REDS when they shot that scene?).

Interestingly this film came out in 1998, and many of the core ideas it explores became the focus of Ralph Nader's 2000 campaign for President. Today it is John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich who have taken up the role of working class heroes. The next few years will tell whether the Democrats truly can be a party of the people -- or if it is finally time for the masses to break ranks and independently form a real people's movement.