Hollywood is betting the house this weekend. Warner Bros is gambling that a $100m budget, megawatt stars – Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe – and an A-list director, Sir Ridley Scott, will finally convince Americans to do something they have steadfastly refused to do these past few years: venture into cinemas to see a movie that is, at least partly, about current events and the war in Iraq.Body of Lies, an explosives-strewn espionage thriller, stars DiCaprio as a CIA operative hunting terrorists on the ground in Iraq, and Crowe as his handler back in the US.

Hollywood executives will be very closely watching how Body of Lies performs because, as the election draws close, the studios are releasing an unprecedented clutch of serious films, about politics, war and religion. It’s cinematic fare that can often be box office poison, but Hollywood is hoping that the excitement about politics generated by the imminent election will rub off.

The big question remains: do Americans really want to be confronted by the issues and wars that define their world and lives? We’ll find out in the next few months. Following Body of Lies into cinemas next weekend is the highly-touted W, Oliver Stone’s cheeky biopic about George W. Bush. W was rushed through post-production so it could be released before the election. Will the timing help?

“Judging from how little impact Bush has had on correcting our economic crisis,” says Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times, “most people in America have seen enough of him to last a lifetime. They’re not eager to revisit his rise to power and fall from grace at the local multiplex.” But Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter believes W’s greatest strength “is that it wants to talk about what’s on our minds right now and not wait for the historians.”

Religulous, a satirical documentary from political talk show host Bill Maher about religion and religious fanaticism, is also on release. The film, which skewers all religious faith, has been helped by being delayed so it could be released nearer the election; in the summer Sarah Palin and her Pentecostalism were not on the radar. Hoping to cash in on a political fever that may be short-lived, a number of other politically focused films are hitting movie and TV screens. British television viewers have just been treated to Recount, the well-reviewed docu-drama starring Kevin Spacey about the disputed 2000 US election and the Florida recount. In the run-up to the 2008 election, Recount makes salutary viewing, retelling the story of the how the 2000 election in the world’s most powerful democracy was eventually decided by the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

“The film is not about who should have won,” says screenwriter Danny Strong. “This movie is about our electoral process and gives us an intimate look at how this process went down in one particular state. It asks the American people: is this how you want to elect a president?”

Those wondering why so many Republican presidents have been elected in recent history would do well to watch Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. The documentary, which has just been released in the US, tells the astonishing and unfortunately true story of the late Republican political operative Lee Atwater.

The larger than life, blues guitar-playing Atwater was the originator of the ‘values-based’ personal attacks that have underpinned Republican campaigning for the past quarter of a century, and which McCain and Palin are using again by accusing Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists”. Atwater helped Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr win the presidency and was a tutor and friend to Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political adviser. It was Atwater who devised the ‘Willie Horton’ racist ad that helped Bush Sr to victory by defining his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis as a soft liberal who would let black murderers out of jail. Atwater also concocted the infamous ‘push polling’, in which voters are called to answer fake political surveys.

Politics also deeply informs the movie Milk, which stars Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. It will be premiered at the end of October. In 1978, in the early days of the gay rights movement, Milk, a San Francisco caretaker, was assassinated by Dan White, who also shot and killed San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Its makers clearly hope the film, which is directed by Gus Van Sant, will have a powerful contemporary resonance. Trailers for Milk, for which Penn is already being talked about as a major Oscar contender, are now running as California and other states consider whether to allow or ban gay marriages in the November elections.

Frost/Nixon is the film adaptation of Peter Morgan’s critically acclaimed play about the televised 1977 interviews between David Frost and disgraced former president Richard Nixon. The film stars Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, but has been given a Hollywood gloss by director Ron Howard (The Da Vinci Code). Frost/Nixon will open the London Film Festival this week and will be released on Dec 5 in the US. Perhaps surprisingly, Morgan says he has been keen to avoid Frost/Nixon being seen as a parable on the past eight harrowing years with George W. Bush.

“If anything, I went back to the text to take things out,” says Morgan. “I didn’t want it to be viewed in the context as a metaphor for Iraq and the Bush presidency.”

Audiences at the London Film Festival will also get to see Che, the two-part Spanish-language biopic about Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara, starring Benicio del Toro, directed by Steven Soderbergh and produced by Laura Bickford, the same team that made the Oscar-winning Traffic. The films tell the extraordinary story of the takeover of Cuba in 1959 and of Guevara’s disastrous attempt to foment a similar revolution in Bolivia, which led to his execution in 1967.

“Elections are a time when history can be redefined,” says Bickford, Che’s producer, who has been working on the project for eight years.

Michael Moore, who released the anti-Bush polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 before the 2004 election, is contributing to this election season with Slacker Uprising, which he has made available for free downloads on the internet. The film is about the tour of battleground states Moore made in 2004 to encourage younger Americans to vote. Two million people watched it in its first three days.

As Hollywood prepares to get serious in the next few months, it would be funny if it weren’t so troubling to reflect that the most successful film to focus even tangentially on the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is the comedy Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, about two marijuana-loving slackers who mistakenly get imprisoned in Gitmo: it took $38m at the American box office when it was released earlier this year.

That’s more than double what any other film that has even touched upon America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made. The Kite Runner, for example, about the lives of two Afghan boys whose lives are transformed by war, took just $15.8m, even though it was based on a novel which had sold millions of copies. Throwing major Hollywood stars into the mix hasn’t helped. Rendition starred Reese Witherspoon, Hollywood’s top female star of recent years, in a thriller as a woman whose Egyptian husband has been kidnapped by the CIA and tortured in a foreign jail. Box office? Just $9.7 million.

“Americans don’t want didactic films, and they don’t want didactic politics in films,” believes Steven J. Ross, who teaches film and popular culture at the University of Southern California. “They’re going to the movies to be entertained. If politics come up in the course of entertainment, they’ll accept it, but not if they’re hit over the head with strong ideological points of view.”

Perhaps that’s why, despite Warner Bros’ huge gamble, almost no one else in Hollywood is willing to bet – particularly with the economy in free-fall – that Americans will flock to see Body of Lies when it opens this weekend. Some box office analysts are even predicting that it will be beaten to the number one spot by a movie about a pampered talking dog, Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Now what would that say about the desire of Americans to engage with the world at this crucial time?—Dawn/Guardian News Service