Kerry comes through in the 'third reel'

And so it ends, and it all came down to the last few minutes of the last day, as we all knew it would. Yes, there was a lot of talk for the first couple of hours of the conventions, but you've heard it all before, and besides, we knew what we were all coming to see. Wes Clark's "this soldier" speech, Joe Lieberman's lecture on civic duty, Nancy Pelosi's reminder of the congressional elections: all else was simply prelude.

It's almost precisely like an action movie: the first hundred minutes of the film are filled with random car chases and the beating up of anonymous flunkies, but there's only one fight that matters and that's the showdown between the hero and the villain.

You might think that this sort of showdown didn't take place last night in Boston. But that wasn't so. In the Democratic National Convention, the hero was the villain: it may be fair to say that the person who is the greatest threat to John Kerry's presidential prospects is none other than John Kerry. (It's certainly fair to say that the person who has helped John Kerry's presidential prospects more than any other is George W. Bush.)

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Coming into last night, the general consensus was that though Bush's approval ratings were very low for an incumbent at this point and a large percentage of the electorate think the country's going in the wrong direction - two big screaming danger signs for Bush - Kerry had resolutely failed to capitalize on these sentiments because he had failed to connect with an electorate that was as attentive to the election as any in recent political history. Kerry's task last night was to take on, not Bush, but himself.

This is what all the most interesting action movies, by the way, are really about: the hero struggling to defeat some part of himself, whether it's his inability to connect with the innocent love interest, the avowal not to get involved with causes or ideals, or simply the unwillingness to come out of retirement and begin wreaking havoc once more. It's these tendencies in the hero that are the real obstacles to be overcome in the movie: the villain is simply a cheap extra with a set of stock expressions and hackneyed moves.

Action movies are also helpful in resolutely rejecting immersion in, and resorting to, psychology. The reasons why Mel Gibson in "Lethal Weapon" behaves the way he does, though they're briefly advanced, are unimportant: all that matters is that he lives alone and acts crazy on the job, and needs Danny Glover to teach him how to connect to other people again.

Who knows why Kerry, with all his undeniable intelligence and his remarkable service and dedication, has come across the way he does - aloof, uninterested, unengaged? Is it something in his family? Is it something in his self? None of that matters now.

All that matters is that the Democratic candidate for president has a problem with reaching out to the American people, and Thursday night was his moment to face it head on. Others have tried to humanize him -his daughters and his fellow soldiers did their best, in strong speeches, and a Morgan Freeman-narrated, Stephen Spielberg-edited film was so slick you could hardly see its slickness - but ultimately testimonials are only other people's word, and, trustworthy as they may be, in a democracy everybody gets to make up their own mind, and most of us rely on what we see, not what others tell us we should.

And so, then, the question: how did he do? How did the movie end?

It was rough going at the beginning - Kerry's first line, "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty", seemed like a cheesy attempt at a Hollywood tagline; he stumbled over a couple of his lines, he rambled a bit, and he stepped on applause lines. But every action hero has to get knocked around a bit before they begin to gain the upper hand. And that's what John Kerry managed to do.

You could see it best in the applause lines, I think. At the beginning, Kerry kept bulldozing through them, not trusting his rapport with the audience, worried, perhaps that they weren't open to him, as he had been portrayed as closed to them. But as the minutes went on, he went into the zone: even as the speech became less personal, biographical, and more about policy and legislation, he somehow managed to keep a connection with the audience.

I mean, when you manage to get an audience - even a self-selected one - to cheer you loudly on issues of health care, then you know you're doing pretty well. And by the time he ended with "our best days are still to come," he didn't have to pause, since all there was was applause.

No, no one is ever going to accuse Kerry of having the common touch, but he reached out and in forty-six minutes managed to inspire an audience with a dream of a Kerry presidency and of a President Kerry, perhaps for the first time. Let the credits roll and the screen fade to black - we can leave the theater satisfied. The action hero came back in the third reel and emerged triumphant.