Henry Fonda for President Review: The Dying Dream of a Better America

The Academy Awards likely aren’t that important in the grand scheme of film history, but legendary actor Henry Fonda winning his first competitive Oscar merely five months before dying is perhaps one of those things that makes you think on a cosmic scale. Henry Fonda for President, coming at a moment when it seems like the whole American project is explicitly dying in front of our very eyes, probably isn’t afraid to make you lean that way. It’s hard not to be at least a little moved by this film, even if it eventually comes to suggest a bludgeoning. 

Film historian and director Alexander Horwath’s three-hour video essay throws out a grand spectrum of ideas over its perhaps-too-long runtime. But things begin when Horwath cites his own radicalized moment of cinephilia: a family trip to Paris in the summer of 1980, where, as a teen, he catches multiple Henry Fonda films at the Cinémathèque with his parents. Happening the same moment that Fonda is filming his swan song, On Golden Pond, and Ronald Reagan is accepting the Republican nomination for President, the next step in history (inevitably towards a worse future) is being made. The film frequently makes the point of pitting Fonda, a great actor with progressive politics, versus Reagan, a mediocre performer with even far worse views. Of course, history will tell you who won out in the end. At a time when people’s parasocial relationship with stars plays out to disturbing ends on social media every day, Horwath’s epic presents a thesis not so far drawn from our tendency for projection. A part of me almost wants to ask the Austrian: why do you still care so much about America?

The title originates from an episode of the forgotten Norman Lear sitcom Maude, where the outspokenly liberal title character pins her hopes for the 1976 Presidential election on the veteran star. Representative of New Deal politics through films like The Grapes of Wrath as well as ’50s liberal humanism via 12 Angry Men, Fonda spoke to the fundamentally good American alienated by reactionaries like Eisenhower or Nixon. Offscreen, Fonda often lived up to the earnest good men he depicted onscreen, a Tom Joad-like voice of reason. 

Horwath structures the film not just around clips and interviews from the Fonda back catalog, but his own trek across America, seeing how settings from Fonda’s films and his own life are standing some 80-to-90 years later. It’s hard not to slightly cringe at the association between Fonda’s stage-acting days and footage from the outside of a Broadway performance of Hamilton, if then cutting to a Trump-mask-wearing performer in Times Square only elaborates the point to a degree you want to perhaps black-out memories of the past ten years of culture. 

There’s an extent to which Horwath’s project made me think a bit of Wim Wenders’ road films: a classical, Hollywood-worshiping European romanticizing America while traveling across it. Wenders’ straight-faced corniness would be hard to pull off nowadays, and frankly makes many a modern cinephile grouse. Travel deeper, and you’ll likely see Fonda as the exception and not the rule––a matter of which the film, to be fair, is at least somewhat aware. 

The film’s earnestness is appealing, and also why it becomes tough company after a while. But even if it makes clear from the beginning the inevitable conclusion of the dying of the Fonda light against the Reagan revolution that irreversibly changed America, it’s hard not having a bit of a pit in your stomach over a path not taken. 

Henry Fonda for President opens at Anthology Film Archives on Thursday, April 3 and will expand.

The post Henry Fonda for President Review: The Dying Dream of a Better America first appeared on The Film Stage.