Post by Forever Xena on Sept 12, 2005 9:25:15 GMT -6
Feminist Fantasy: Geena Davis in the Oval Office
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 11, 2005
THERE aren't that many glass ceilings left now that women have been in space, in combat and on the Fortune 500 list. That leaves the Oval Office as feminism's final frontier.
Kent Eanes/ABC
Geena Davis as president, with Kyle Secor, left, and Anthony Azizi in "Commander in Chief."
On ABC's "Commander in Chief," Geena Davis plays Mackenzie Allen, the vice president who becomes leader of the free world when the president has a stroke - a 25th Amendment fantasy played out, not as comedy, but as a distaff version of "The West Wing."
The show is alarmingly blithe about foreign policy, and sometimes a little silly ("Can't you smell the history?" one aide says to another) but a woman in charge of the nuclear button is a beguiling premise. What would that White House be like?
Apparently, it would be a lot like "The West Wing," but the casting, at least, is creative. Ms. Davis is surprisingly commanding as commander in chief (Earth Girls aren't easy). Calm, stately and quick witted, President Allen is as honorable and able as "The West Wing's" Josiah Bartlet, but it turns out that even in fiction women have to try twice as hard as men. President Bartlet was a university professor with a Nobel Prize in economics. Mackenzie Adams is a university chancellor whose leadership garnered two Nobel Prizes.
Allen is the un-Hillary, as likable as Laura Bush and as tough as Harry S. Truman. But she has enemies: as he was dying, the president and his men urged Allen, an independent, to resign in favor of the speaker of the House, an archconservative far closer in ideology to the president. Donald Sutherland, a cunningly malevolent Speaker Nathan Templeton, is a superb conspirator. Her main ally is her husband, Rod Allen (Kyle Secor), a kind, loving helpmate who was his wife's chief of staff when she was the veep but finds himself exiled to the East Wing, planning menus under the portrait of Nancy Reagan.
"Commander in Chief" is a liberal fantasy, but at a time when conservative Republicans rule and Democrats are on the defensive, it's fun to imagine a woman with a feminist agenda in the situation room while her husband decorates the White House Christmas tree.
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 11, 2005
THERE aren't that many glass ceilings left now that women have been in space, in combat and on the Fortune 500 list. That leaves the Oval Office as feminism's final frontier.
Kent Eanes/ABC
Geena Davis as president, with Kyle Secor, left, and Anthony Azizi in "Commander in Chief."
On ABC's "Commander in Chief," Geena Davis plays Mackenzie Allen, the vice president who becomes leader of the free world when the president has a stroke - a 25th Amendment fantasy played out, not as comedy, but as a distaff version of "The West Wing."
The show is alarmingly blithe about foreign policy, and sometimes a little silly ("Can't you smell the history?" one aide says to another) but a woman in charge of the nuclear button is a beguiling premise. What would that White House be like?
Apparently, it would be a lot like "The West Wing," but the casting, at least, is creative. Ms. Davis is surprisingly commanding as commander in chief (Earth Girls aren't easy). Calm, stately and quick witted, President Allen is as honorable and able as "The West Wing's" Josiah Bartlet, but it turns out that even in fiction women have to try twice as hard as men. President Bartlet was a university professor with a Nobel Prize in economics. Mackenzie Adams is a university chancellor whose leadership garnered two Nobel Prizes.
Allen is the un-Hillary, as likable as Laura Bush and as tough as Harry S. Truman. But she has enemies: as he was dying, the president and his men urged Allen, an independent, to resign in favor of the speaker of the House, an archconservative far closer in ideology to the president. Donald Sutherland, a cunningly malevolent Speaker Nathan Templeton, is a superb conspirator. Her main ally is her husband, Rod Allen (Kyle Secor), a kind, loving helpmate who was his wife's chief of staff when she was the veep but finds himself exiled to the East Wing, planning menus under the portrait of Nancy Reagan.
"Commander in Chief" is a liberal fantasy, but at a time when conservative Republicans rule and Democrats are on the defensive, it's fun to imagine a woman with a feminist agenda in the situation room while her husband decorates the White House Christmas tree.