LBJ

I can understand the desire to make a biopic of President Lyndon B. Johnson, mostly due to his place in a very tumultuous time in American history and how that time may relate to today. There are even ideas in LBJ that point to a deeper understanding of the man on a more personal level, namely his acumen as a politician and struggles with being liked by the American public, something that turns into true insecurity. In LBJ — here played by Woody Harrelson — there’s an attempt at creating a fully formed and complex portrait of this man. And that is commendable, especially since much of the film revolves around Johnson’s passing of the Civil Rights Act.

But while I can understand what LBJ is going for, this doesn’t mean it achieves it in any real meaningful fashion. I place a lot of this at the feet of director Rob Reiner, who’s really not the filmmaker to be tackling something this potentially weighty. I think the studio understands this, too, since they’re trying to sell the movie on Reiner’s helming of The American President (1995) and A Few Good Men (1992) over two decades ago. What he’s made is fine and little else, a film with no panache, no energy and no understanding of how to make his generally generic and listless film have the urgency its topic needs to succeed. I can’t help but compare LBJ not to other presidential biopics, but to Pablo Larrain’s Jackie (2016), which dealt with the same period of time and a very different topic but managed to take a recognizable and iconic moment in America’s history and make it feel new and urgent.

Reiner is far from adventurous (the fractured timeline of the first half of the movie is about as experimental as anyone can expect from him) and his understanding of racial tension is about what you’d expect from the man who made The Bucket List (2007). It all feels too self-contained, too focused on Johnson and recounting facts and not a part of the larger culture it’s supposed to inhabit — both the ’60s and modern times. It’s a film that’s only concerned with telling a story in the most basic terms possible and never even hints at any ambition that could or would make LBJ any greater, something that history has told us reeks of Reiner.

None of this makes LBJ unwatchable. Instead, it’s just a perfectly OK movie that no one will remember two months from now, playing in theaters full of perfectly OK movies no one will remember two months from now. What’s pitiable is how there was a notion at some point that this could have been something more. I feel as if Harrelson’s heavy prosthetics and makeup hammer this point home. It’s ripe with the scent of Oscar bait, long after the days of this sort of gimmickry really working. What’s unfortunate is that Harrelson’s perfectly adequate as Johnson, but there’s something distracting about his get-up and the unshakable sense that it’s always Harrelson under all that rubber. The whole thing just feels like a movie, never taking the audience beyond its own movie seat. Rated R for language. Now playing at Carolina Cinemark, Regal Biltmore Grande.