BULWORTH

<![CDATA[<i>]]>Bulworth<![CDATA[</i>]]> is about a Democratic senator from California (Beatty), up for re-election in 1996, who is having a nervous breakdown, takes out a contract on himself, and then finds himself blurting out the truth instead of the usual packaged lies during his campaign. He hasn’t slept for days, and after throwing caution to the winds and going off to a hip-hop club with Nina (Halle Berry) and two other young women from South Central L.A., he starts parsing out all his public statements in rap, scandalizing his staff and various media people with the form and content of his forthright declarations. Then after flirting with Nina, meeting her family, saving some boys in the hood from a cop beating, and more or less deciding he wants to be black, he concludes that he doesn’t want to get bumped off after all.
A movie by a control freak that’s slightly – and, it appears, deliberately – out of control, <![CDATA[<i>]]>Bulworth<![CDATA[</i>]]> is full of delirious risks, and that may be the most likable thing about it. Beatty isn’t any sort of stylist when it comes to directing, a fact that became painfully clear with <![CDATA[<i>]]>Dick Tracy<![CDATA[</i>]]> and is more implicit in the overly busy script machinations of this lively farce, which he negotiates dutifully rather than gracefully.