The oddest entertainment story of the week reports that Aaron Sorkin has agreed to write the screenplay and direct the film of The Politician, Andrew Young‘s account of his disappointing time as an aide to the vain, dishonest and dishonorable Senator John Edwards, and Young’s complicity is hiding the extra-marital affair and pregnancy that Edwards and his ditsy gal pal Rielle Hunter that the conducted while running for the presidency. This seems like an unlikely pairing of artist and subject matter. I admire Sorkin quite a bit; I’m a loyal fan of The West Wing. But Sorkin, though hipper and occasionally cynical, is really very romantic about politics. Nobody likes a hero more than Sorkin; nearly every character he created for The West Wing had a clean mind and a full heart and a staunch belief in America, and suffered a crisis of conscience if he or she so much as deposited a gum wrapper in the wrong recycling repository. (The same was true with A Few GoodMen! And for The American President, in which even Michael Douglas played a square-jawed hero! It was even true of Sports Night, which practically oozed integrity!) Even Charlie Wilson’s War, for which Sorkin wrote the screenplay, sanitized the coke-snorting, skirt-chasing congressman of the title, rendered him an innocent bystander in all those hut tubs he frequented, and had him tear up over poor Afghan orphans. How much of that transmogrification can be blamed on Mike Nichols and Tom Hanks is an open question, but I didn’t see Sorkin take his name off the whitewash of the wascally Wilson. But there are no heroes in The Politician. Edwards comes across as an odious charlatan, Elizabeth Edwards as a harridan and a user, Hunter as a homewrecker, and Young as pathetic, self-deluding, enabling, complicit doormat. If ever a subject called for the talents of black-hearted satirist like Armando Ianucci, this was it. Instead, it goes to a man who is only slightly edgier than Steven Spielberg.
