There are movies you like, and then there are movies you keep going back to—not because you’ve forgotten them but because you need to be reminded of something they contain. The American President (1995) is one of those few Washington romances that doesn’t just flirt with politics as sexy wallpaper; it insists—softly, stubbornly—that there’s still room for decency in public life and that leadership can be firm without being brutal. Watching it now, after years in which the national mood has verged on an addiction to outrage, it feels less like a fantasy of a perfect administration than a yearning for a familiar kind of humanity in power: flawed people trying, in public, to do the right thing.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Rob Reiner directed and produced the film from an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, and you can feel both men in every scene: Sorkin’s high-wire talk—idealistic, rhythmic, impatient with cynicism—and Reiner’s steady hand shaping it into something warmer, more intimate, more audience-facing. Michael Douglas plays President Andrew Shepherd; a widower whose approval ratings are strong enough to make him confident and vulnerable enough to make him reckless. Annette Bening’s Sydney Ellen Wade, an environmental lobbyist newly arrived in Washington, isn’t presented as a manic pixie savior or a starry-eyed accessory—she’s smart, principled, and occasionally blunt in a way that creates friction rather than movie-cute convenience. Around them, the supporting cast—Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, and Richard Dreyfuss most prominently—functions like a pressure system: loyalty, ambition, cynicism, and institutional habit pressing in on the most private thing a president can attempt, which is to fall in love without turning the act of loving into a national referendum.
The genius of the film is that it understands romance and governance share a common enemy: spin. Reiner, who came out of television’s most politically combustible living room as “Meathead” on All in the Family, has always been drawn to stories about people cornered by public perception—how the crowd, the press, the opposition, even your own staff can reduce a living person into a symbol and then punish the symbol for not behaving like a machine. That’s why The American President doesn’t treat the White House as a marble palace; it treats it as a terrarium where oxygen is rationed. Every gesture becomes strategy. Every dinner becomes optics. Every human weakness becomes a headline.
If you want to see Reiner’s fingerprints most clearly, consider the film’s emotional temperature. The Sorkin script is built for velocity—policy arguments that hit like drumbeats, moral clarity expressed in articulate bursts—but Reiner insists on pauses: a look held a moment longer than the line requires, a hallway that feels suddenly too long, a private hesitation after a public performance. This is the same director who made When Harry Met Sally… feel like a debate about love that still ended in tenderness. In The American President, he aims that sensibility at the Oval Office itself, daring to suggest that the ability to govern might actually be enhanced—not weakened—by empathy, restraint, and emotional honesty.
Politically, the film is obviously liberal in its worldview, but not in a hectoring way. The film's agenda is telegraphed in tone: environmental laws are a moral imperative, civil rights are a given, the free press is a necessary irritant rather than an adversary, and political opposition is something to engage with argument, not seek to annihilate. The movie believes—quaintly, almost, by contemporary standards—that persuasion is still possible, that institutions can be fixed and voters are not a mob to be hectored and manipulated but citizens to be addressed. Those aren’t just plot points; they’re values, and they jibe pretty closely with Reiner’s public identity as a long-time progressive activist who has spent decades arguing for an ethic of civic responsibility and engagement, a politics that upholds democratic norms and is rooted in human dignity.
Commercially, The American President performed solidly rather than sensationally: about $108 million worldwide on a reported $62 million budget, and it arrived with the kind of prestige response adult-oriented studio films once reliably earned. It drew Golden Globe nominations across major categories and an Academy Award nomination for Marc Shaiman’s score—music that knows exactly how to sound like “America” without turning patriotic feeling into kitsch. In 2002, the American Film Institute ranked it among America’s greatest love stories—an honor that speaks less to political fashion than to the film’s enduring emotional architecture.
What did Reiner think of the finished film, and did he hold it especially dear? Publicly, he has often spoken about The American President as a film he wanted to make accessible and entertaining while still honest about the strains of the job—how a president might try to balance private life with relentless public scrutiny. He returned to it with clear affection in later anniversary conversations, emphasizing its ongoing relevance and the craft that went into making “politics” play as human drama rather than lecture. And the film’s afterlife—its tonal DNA visible in Sorkin’s later The West Wing—suggests Reiner understood he had helped midwife a particular American yearning: not for a flawless leader, but for a leader who behaves like a grown-up.
That’s also why a sentimental response to the film during the Trump years makes perfect emotional sense. The American President isn’t naive about politics; it’s idealistic about conduct. It depicts opponents who twist narratives, a press that feeds frenzy, and allies who panic when polling dips—yet it still maintains a moral center. In the years when political speech often felt designed to humiliate rather than persuade, when institutions were treated as props, when cruelty was recast as strength, this film became a kind of refuge. Not because it pretends a “gentler administration” has no hard choices, but because it insists that hardness is not the same thing as malice.
Which brings us to the ugliest, most contemporary shadow hanging over this conversation: the politicization of personal tragedy. In the wake of the reported murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, on December 14, 2025—and the arrest of their son Nick Reiner on suspicion of murder, with an original bail reported at $4 million—President Donald Trump drew widespread condemnation for a Truth Social post that mocked or blamed Reiner, invoking “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and insinuating, without evidence, that Reiner’s political opposition had something to do with his death.
Whatever anyone’s politics, that moment is worth discussing soberly because it reveals something The American President tries to argue, almost thirty years earlier: that rhetoric is not harmless, and leadership is not merely policy outcomes but moral atmosphere. Reiner’s film imagines a president who is forced—by crisis, by conscience, by love—to stand up and speak plainly about what the country is and what it shouldn’t become. The real-world spectacle of using a death to score a point is the negative image of that ideal: power exercised without restraint; language used as weapon rather than responsibility.
To promote serious dialogue with this film as an anchor, here’s the question it ultimately asks, and the one our era keeps answering in real time: do we still want leaders who feel like neighbors—flawed, human, accountable—or have we decided politics is a blood sport where decency is weakness and cruelty is authenticity? The American President doesn’t claim the first option is easy. It claims it’s worth fighting for.
I invite readers to share their thoughts, reactions, and perspectives on The American President, Rob Reiner’s vision of leadership, and how the film resonates—or conflicts—with our political reality today in the comments below.
Add comment
Comments