Michael Sheen has played a vampire in the Twilight saga, a terrorist suspect in Unthinkable and interviewer David Frost opposite Frank Langella's Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon. But he keeps returning to the role of former British prime minister Tony Blair, whom he resembles and whose earnest, somewhat fidgety manner he has pretty much nailed.
He played Blair in a 2003 TV movie called The Deal. He played him again in The Queen in 2006, remonstrating with Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. And in The Special Relationship (2010), made for HBO and the BBC and released this week on DVD, he plays Blair opposite Dennis Quaid as U.S. President Bill Clinton. All three films were written by Peter Morgan, who knows how to mine dramatic gold from what would, in lesser hands, be the dull territory of formulaic biopics.
"Special relationship" refers to the bond that Labour leader Blair feels with Clinton as the pair meet in Washington near the end of Clinton's first term. Once elected prime minister, Blair wins help from Clinton in promoting peace in Northern Ireland. In turn, Blair stands by Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair, against the instincts of his advisers. The British leader believes he is in a position to call in a favour from Clinton when the time comes.
That romantic notion is, as Morgan's script gradually reveals, ripe for a mugging by political reality. The question is whether the United States should contribute ground forces to buttress NATO's air strikes in protecting Kosovo's Albanians from Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Where the first half of the movie is content to stay on the periphery of the Lewinsky circus - Morgan largely resists imagining private conversations between Bill and wife Hillary - the second gets into the muck on the Serbian question with a tense duel between idealism and realpolitik. "He's lied to everybody else," Blair snaps at one point. "Why should he be telling me the truth?"
Quaid doesn't slip as effortlessly into Clinton's skin as Sheen does into Blair's, but he has a good handle on the U.S. leader's air of authority and, when the scandal isn't squeezing it out of him, the boyish twinkle in his eye. Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair and Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton (a striking physical resemblance) suggest the iron that makes them good strategists as well as good helpmates. Would Cherie leave him if he were to do what Clinton had done with Lewinsky, Blair asks her at one point. "No," she replies, "but I'd make your life hell."
The door is now open for Morgan to tackle the link between Blair and Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, who figures briefly at film's end. Although The Special Relationship doesn't mention Iraq, it's not hard to read significance into Blair's remark about the world's intervention in Serbia. "Let no one ever doubt again the moral justification for invading another country for humanitarian ends."
Right, then, it's settled. No one but Sheen can play the role if Morgan deigns to write such a sequel. As Quaid says in the extras, "I think he is Tony Blair, isn't he?"