Screenwriter Peter Morgan is having a great career in politics. With “The Queen," “The Deal," “The Last King of Scotland," “Frost/Nixon," and, now, “The Special Relationship," Morgan brings us into the living rooms and kitchens of larger-than-life figures such as Queen Elizabeth II, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former US President Richard Nixon. He imagines their lonely moments, their tangled relationships, and their darkest fears, and then shows how those personal issues factor into world events as we know them. He writes small movies set in grand circumstances.

Obviously, Morgan has to impose storytelling methods onto non-fiction — plot arcs, overarching themes, dialogue. For “The Special Relationship," about the rapport between Blair (played by Michael Sheen) and President Clinton (Dennis Quaid) during their years in office, he has imposed the notion of "bromance” onto the US-UK connection. This new HBO movie turns Blair and Clinton into long-distance pals who meet in 1996 and quickly bond over a game of squash — squashing right-wing politics, that is. “Progressive centre-left politics is the future,” Clinton says to Blair (long before the Bush presidency proved him wrong). It's a pat view of history, of course, as Morgan leaves out copious factual detail to stay focused on his heroes.

But “The Special Relationship" works well enough despite having been reduced and shaped. It's a miniature portrait of how political bonds can be created, and tested, and broken. Named after Winston Churchill's 1946 phrase for the US-UK relationship, the movie tracks Blair and Clinton through a number of important tests of their friendship, including the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Blair is morally offended by Clinton's adulterous behaviour and his lying, yet he's willing to stand by the man. “He’s hardly bloody Milosevic,” he says to his advisors. Clinton was there for him when he needed help with upheaval in Northern Ireland.

The problems presented by stopping Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic and his racial genocide are a much more difficult stumbling block for the pair. Blair pushes Clinton to agree to put US ground troops in Kosovo, and later takes his plea to the US media when Clinton resists. Clinton, already scarred by the Lewinsky scandal, never quite trusts Blair again, even while they and their wives, Hillary (Hope Davis) and Cherie (Helen McCrory), continue to socialise. Once Clinton spots the opportunistic and predatory streak hidden behind Blair's polite mien, he never takes his eye off it.

As Clinton, Quaid does a nice job of evoking the president without quite caricaturing him. He presents Clinton as a man of great appetite -- he always seems to be eating in the movie — and as a broad, eccentric American who looks like a cartoon beside the reserved Brits. Hope Davis, too, manages to bring the former first lady to life without triggering “Saturday Night Live" flashbacks. She delivers Hillary Clinton's cackle without pushing it into parody, and she makes Hillary's cool tolerance of her husband's weakness appealing.

Sheen has played Blair twice before, and he does it well. The script, however, fails him early on by making Blair into too much of an innocent looking to President Clinton for mentoring. This makes sense on a dramatic level, as the audience sees Blair evolve across the movie and gain confidence and independence, but it challenges believability. The guy became prime minister, after all; surely he had some cynicism about politics before he met Clinton. No one gets to the top without it.

Source: Internet