A Few Days in September ****

Unlike so many of them out there, this is a good political drama. Lately we have been staying away from this genre because much of what has been produced in the last few years has been done so with an agenda so obvious that you feel as if you made the mistake of inviting Sean Penn over for dinner and now you are sorely regretting it as he launches into his third tirade during the second course and blows cigarette smoke in your face (think “Lions for Lambs”). But lately we have been on a Juliette Binoche kick so when this film popped up on our Watch Instantly radar with the additional carrot of John Turturro, we bit.

Aside from it being an entertaining, well-acted film, what you can deeply appreciate about “A Few Days in September” is its treatment of our political world with the complexity that the subject matter deserves. The world has grown simply too big for there to be just two sides to anything. It’s naïve to think that a government as big as the United States can be simply “for” something and also not be ambivalent towards or against it. Have you ever tried getting even a four-person family to decide unanimously on where to go to dinner Friday night? Good. Now imagine a huge bureaucracy trying to come to a consensus on anything. Instinctively we know this and yet we continuously attempt to turn every issue into a black and white picture that is easy on our eyes and requires nothing more from us than to pick a side. So what is the answer? Oddly, “A Few Days in September” seems to be suggesting – poetry.

The first clue we receive is that the principle adversaries in the movie are named Pound and Elliot. The hit man, Mr. Pound has learned an appreciation of poetry from the master spy, Mr. Elliot. Pound recites Blake while watching the blood drain from one of his victims. Meanwhile Elliot’s stepson, David, loves poetry as much as his father much to the vexation of Elliot’s estranged daughter. But perhaps the most poetic character is Irene who functions alternately as master spy and “mother” to the two charges that her friend, Elliot, has asked her to chaperone to a meeting with him.

The movie culminates in poetic justice. The attack on the twin towers has inadvertently spawned a love between two young (and technically incestuous) hopefuls.