De Niro plays former U.S. President George Mullen. After a brief prologue that finds him frantically fiddling with the combination to a safe as something chaotic happens on the other side of a door, we jump back a few days to a quieter time. We meet him doing his morning this and that, swallowing pills (he is old, after all, but we will keep coming back to those pills), doing laps in his pool, jogging with the dog, checking the bird feeder.
Wife Sheila (Joan Allen) is not on-site, but we can see from a cannily displayed newspaper headline that she is a personage herself, nominated to the Federal Court of Appeals. Mullen meets with a potential ghostwriter sent hopefully to help with his overdue memoir. We learn in this meeting that the ex-president shocked the world by not running for virtually guaranteed reelection -- something about his son, but "there are those who say there are other reasons."