‘Playing POTUS’ Review: Fun, Limited Doc about Presidential Imitations

It’s been nearly two months since Morgan Neville’s amusing and thoroughly superficial Lorne, in which the Oscar-winning documentarian tried and failed to get the Saturday Night Live creator to let down his guard. So I guess we were overdue for a new Saturday Night Live-based documentary.

Josh Greenbaum’s Playing POTUS isn’t exactly a Saturday Night Live-based documentary — not in the way the various SNL50 docs or films focusing on high-profile SNL alums like Chevy Chase and Eddie Murphy were Saturday Night Live-based documentaries. But for all of its ostensible focus on a wide variety of comic impressions and impersonations of presidents, I’d estimate that at least 75 percent of the documentary’s 93-minute running time is dedicated to Saturday Night Live.

As Playing POTUS: SNL’s 50 Years of Presidents, this vague adaptation of Peter Funt’s book titled Playing POTUS: The Power of America’s ‘Acting Presidents’ is fine. It’s missing some key interview subjects and dodges or entirely misses some key topics, but when you have talent as clever and enthusiastic as Dana Carvey, Will Ferrell, Kate McKinnon and Darrell Hammond, you’re bound to find some insights and ample entertainment.

However, as Playing POTUS: Not Just SNL, it’s barely functional, to a degree of near pointlessness. The failure to analyze or even acknowledge countless comic interpretations of presidents in contexts that lack Lorne Michaels is so thoroughly bizarre that the entire documentary becomes more head-scratching than enlightening. Though like Neville’s Lorne, it’s at least an entertaining trifle.

The frustrating thing about Playing POTUS is that it starts off reasonably promising, using John F. Kennedy impersonator Vaughn Meader, whose comedy record The First Family is one of the strangest winners of the Grammy for album of the year. It isn’t deep historical context, but it’s absolutely historical context, followed by a swift jog through the Smothers Brothers and…that’s pretty much it for comic presidential impersonations before Saturday Night Live.

The meat of the documentary is the different SNL presidents talking about their individual impressions, their origins and their causally unprovable impacts on the perception of those presidents.

This is the best part of the documentary, whether it’s Chevy Chase cackling at the possibility that he might have contributed to Gerald Ford’s speedy electoral defeat; Dana Carvey talking (for possibly the millionth time) about how he was so stymied by George Bush that he cobbled together a character who often had nothing at all to do with its source; Alec Baldwin reading both negative tweets from Donald Trump and, proudly, his own responses; or Kate McKinnon getting emotional still talking about her version of Hillary Clinton and Hillary’s 2016 defeat.

Greenbaum and his subjects are willing to acknowledge some of the less successful impressions over the years — “Of all the presidents who have ever been on SNL, I think I was my least favorite” Will Forte says of following Will Ferrell as George Bush Junior — as well as the lengthy struggles to find an appropriate Obama or Joe Biden.

With the help of a couple of experts, Playing POTUS does well with explaining how frequently SNL‘s impressions have achieved a level of hyper-reality, in which the heightened Xerox supplants the actual historical figure in the collective consciousness. In that light, though, it’s strange not to dedicate a single second to then-candidate Donald Trump’s appearance hosting Saturday Night Live.

Although the documentary suffers a little from the absence of Tina Fey as part of a lengthy segment on her Sarah Palin impression and its effect on the 2008 election, that probably should have made Greenbaum realize that not only was Palin never elected POTUS (nor was Hillary Clinton, it should be added), she wasn’t elected veep either. Playing POTUS also covers Maya Rudolph’s impression of Kamala Harris, who doesn’t technically align with the title. Perhaps that all could have been 15 minutes redistributed into non-SNL terrain.

Keegan-Michael Key is great discussing the origins of Luther, Obama’s anger translator. Rich Little is present to discuss general impressions. Seth Meyers is part of a decent segment on the history of presidential roasting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

But if the topic is meant to be broad, it’s head-scratching to ignore The Simpsons, South Park and any movie that took a comic approach to a specifically named president — Dick, W., Vice, etc. In this film’s universe, In Living Color apparently never existed, nor did Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s That’s My Bush!, a multi-cam sitcom about George W. Bush and his family. Mad TV is mentioned only nebulously, though full credit to Will Sasso, the only talking head in the documentary capable of expressing regret at how much and how wrongly Monica Lewinsky was lampooned in conjunction with Bill Clinton.

There’s something astonishingly and instantly dated about how thoroughly Greenbaum misses the way new media has and continues to approach Donald Trump. Sarah Cooper may have been a flash-in-the-pan, but if you can’t find something substantive to say about how a multi-racial woman became a fleeting sensation lip-synching Donald Trump, you’re not trying very hard.

Instead, Greenbaum, who did far better and smarter work with many of the same people in Too Funny to Fail and Will & Harper, wastes time on a voiceover device that’s too cutesy to be worth the effort and a three-act structure that’s more for the benefit of his editors than the audience. It all results in a potentially meaningful documentary that isn’t bad, just lacking.