How Blair, Brown made ‘The Deal’

Just how fascinating do Americans find Tony Blair? Certainly he’s getting more screen time lately than any of our own leaders.

Last year, the now-former British prime minister coaxed Elizabeth II into a more modern relationship with her people in “The Queen.” The film belonged, of course, to Helen Mirren, who won pretty much every award available for her portrayal of the monarch in the weeks following Princess Diana’s death, but Michael Sheen collected kudos if not statuary for his Blair.

If you thought he didn’t get nearly enough screen time, then you’re in luck. Because “The Queen” was merely the second part of a Blair trilogy, conceived by director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan, the first part of which, “The Deal,” has its American premiere tonight on HBO.

“The Deal,” which stars Sheen in what is becoming his signature role, chronicles Blair’s rise to power in the 1990s, focusing on his relationship with Gordon Brown (David Morrissey), Britain’s current prime minister. Brown, a taciturn Scotsman and lifelong pillar of the Labor Party, was Blair’s mentor and was long considered the natural heir to party leadership. Until Blair stepped in. With his Cheshire cat smile and winning ways, the young MP surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, used his superior understanding of media and diplomacy to eclipse Brown, who had considered passion synonymous with anger and had little patience for compromise.

A cinematic trilogy about a prime minister who is not Winston Churchill, and who still walks among us, might seem a strange idea, especially to an American audience. Here, lifelong attachments to one politician or another went out with Franklin Roosevelt. For those not conversant in the ways of British politics, the film will be slow going, especially in the beginning. But Frears and Morgan are such fine filmmakers that if the subject matter of “The Deal” does not have the magazine cover value of “The Queen,” the artistry makes it worth watching.

Quietly tense and, in its way, a lovely piece, “The Deal” examines not only the mercurial relationship between two alpha-dog politicians but also the vagaries of public mood and the wary kinship of brilliance and leadership. (They are not very often, it turns out, the same thing.) As with “The Queen,” Morgan combines film clips with dramatic action, offering not only a primer of British politics for the last 30 years but also an overview of how attitudes have changed on both sides of the pond. Brown finally bows to Blair not because he considers him a better leader but because he recognizes that Blair has figured out the new politics, in which appearance often trumps substance.

“Lately there have been presentational difficulties,” Brown is told by his friend and fellow Labor MP Peter Mandelson (Paul Rhys), who attempts to explain the party’s shift toward Blair. “Politics is not always about higher matters. Sometimes it is about the ugly business of making friends, keeping friends. Being liked.”

Morrissey, last seen in “State of Play,” frowns and growls as Brown, mastering the PM’s tics, down to his tendency to rake his hand through his hair, in a way that will no doubt resonate a bit better with British expats and true Anglophiles. But by embodying the outrage many feel when the person with the better on-camera presence wins the prize, Morrissey’s Brown is less a significant re-creation of a great political figure than a reminder of how many great leaders of the past would not stand a chance in the present.

Which isn’t to say that “The Deal” skewers Blair. His ascendancy is not portrayed as the betrayal Brown considers it but rather the product of pragmatic ambition -- Blair’s talents dovetailed with the times, and he made the most of it.

“I accept you are the stronger candidate in many ways,” Blair says to Brown, “and it may be a quirk of fate that I emerge as the better candidate to lead this party.”

Americans have had some experience with likability trumping capability and this message goes some distance to explain what value a Blair trilogy has, at least to an American audience. The characters of “The Deal” manage to transcend their place, if not their time. Both men are a mixture of ego and ideals, and any deal between them would be volatile and easily misinterpreted, as, indeed, it is. But Frears and Morgan appreciate the power of subtlety. In “The Deal,” as in “The Queen,” the politicians are neither monsters nor saints, but men and women with gifts and flaws. And in “The Deal,” we see, if nothing else, a British appreciation for the power and beauty found in shades of gray.

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com

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‘The Deal’

Where: HBO

When: 9 to 10:30 tonight

Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)