In the movie "Spartan," is the girl supposed to be a Bush daughter?

Over the weekend I saw Spartan (2004), written and directed by David Mamet:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0360009/

I'll avoid MAJOR spoilers, but you may wish to avoid reading the rest of the post if you haven't seen the movie. (I thought it was excellent, by the way. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys intelligent political thrillers, espionage flicks, and/or Mamet.)

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Basic plot: the President's daughter is kidnapped, and shadowy secret agent Val Kilmer is on the case. Yeah, yeah, I know the President in Spartan is named Newton. Nevertheless, the kidnapped girl COULD be a Bush daughter:

* She looks a lot like Barbara, the darker-haired Bush daughter (IMHO).

* She's a college student in Boston. The aforementioned Bush daughter is a Yalie. Close enough.

* Some of her possible, er, extracurricular activities are not unknown among the Bush clan (e.g., cocaine).

* The movie almost certainly takes place post 9/11, with a tough talkin' administration in power. One agent says "we're fighting WWIII out there."

* The Secret Service and/or CIA have been "taking care" of the daughter and covering up the President's sleazy personal foibles for many years. Such long-term care wouldn't make sense except for a two-term President, a President who'd served a term or two as Vice President, or a "Presidential family" such as the Bush clan.

* Her parents want nothing to do with her on any personal level: she's used only as a political prop. This seems to capture the Shrub/Pickles approach to parenting, and it's the complete opposite of the Clinton and Gore families.


Just curious to see what other DUers think ...


On edit: looking way down the cast list at IMDb, I just noticed that Alexandra Kerry (yes, THE Alexandra Kerry) is in the movie!

since Mr. Bush wasn't there with his daughter when she was having an appendectomy surgery, awhile back. Mr. Family Values.

What makes the film compelling, all the same, is its bone-deep cynicism, its presentation of a political world in which everything is false, every value is feigned, and everything is up for grabs. Here the military and intelligence agencies are run by crooks with no regard for the Constitution, and the media is made up of easily manipulated stooges who feed the public a sticky concoction of lies and schmaltz.

A few years into the Clinton administration, movies such as Clint Eastwood's "Absolute Power'' started turning up, with Gene Hackman as a sex- addicted president whose kinkiness and lack of morals lead to murder and cover- up. If "Absolute Power'' was an effective distillation of the Republican paranoid fantasy about Clinton, this is a Democrat's paranoid fantasy about the government under George W. Bush.

Mamet stalwart William H. Macy turns up in a featured role as a government crisis manager, but he doesn't get to act much like William H. Macy -- any stern-looking actor might have handled the role. The one certifiable find in the cast is Kristen Bell as the president's daughter, whom we expect will be a little princess but instead turns out to be an angry guttersnipe. When she says, "I was raised by wolves," there's no doubting her.

More: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/12/DDGTR5ICG51.DTL

and I love David Mamet, Glengarry, Glenross is a classic...

But that could apply to Bush as well.

Just about everything else in the movie points towards Bush and/or away from Clinton/Gore. In addition to the factors I noted in the first post:

* The crisis occurs at the start of the President's re-election campaign. Presuming that the movie takes place in a post-9/11 world (e.g., late 2003 or early 2004), the timing suggests that President Newton, if anyone, is a fictionalized Bush.

* They note that the sleazier elements of the President's personal life would doom his re-election if they became public knowledge. Clinton's personal faults were well known, and his base came to accept (if not condone) them; not so for Bush.

* The administration and media crassly exploit the crisis to create sympathy for the President -- in an election cycle, no less. The media sure as hell wouldn't do that for Clinton or any other Democrat.

* It's a minor point, but I doubt Alexandra Kerry would knowingly appear in an anti-Clinton hit piece.

Other characters reference loosely identifiable political figures: the wild, bar-hopping, Ivy-league First Daughter (the First Twins) ...

More: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/spar-m23.shtml

And I also thought it was a great movie. Too intelligent for the masses needed to make it a hit.

The premise was decent and intriguing, but the execution of the movie was extremely unsatisfactory. It's one of the very few movies I've seen lately that just left me feeling empty at the end, as if I'd just wasted two hours of my life.

The plot was full of holes and poorly explained, and the characters were shallow and one dimensional.

I do think there are a lot of parallels between the fictitious administration in that movie and our current one, though. I suspect that is not an accident.

--Peter

Imagine the scene if she were confronting, say, an underage Bush daughter?