Review

Our Brand Is Crisis

Eddie Camacho (Reynaldo Pacheco) is part of a team trying to install a democratically elected leader in wartorn Bolivia in David Gordon Green’s political comedy Our Brand Is Crisis.
Eddie Camacho (Reynaldo Pacheco) is part of a team trying to install a democratically elected leader in wartorn Bolivia in David Gordon Green’s political comedy Our Brand Is Crisis.

We can all agree that democracy, like communism, soy ice cream and Coppola's Dracula all sound wonderful on paper, but are much less so in reality. Giving the vote to the people and letting a majority determine the course of action seems so simple, but elections have become years-long death marches, with egomaniacal candidates being nose-ring led by beyond-cynical campaign managers, who toy with bigger issues while infusing their would-be leaders with maximized brand appeal, utilizing highly sophisticated marketing savvy and relentless focus groups as if they were selling a new variety of cereal bar. Whatever issues a campaign starts out with inevitably give way to endlessly idiotic minutiae -- the way a candidate smiles, what their hair says about them, or the friend they may or may not have known in elementary school who once wrote an anti-government tweet.

It's a rat race in which the rats are kept in constant motion for months on end, giving the same stump speeches and trying like hell not to give an answer to any question that hasn't been spoon-fed to them by their team of strategists. In these ways, it's clear the brains behind the outfit are rarely the politicians themselves, it's their handpicked campaign teams that make the big decisions for them.

Our Brand Is Crisis

83 Cast: Sandra Bullock, Billy Bob Thornton, Anthony Mackie, Joaquim de Almeida, Ann Dowd, Scoot McNairy, Zoe Kazan, Dominic Flores, Reynaldo Pacheco

Director: David Gordon Green

Rating: R, for language including sexual references

Running time: 107 minutes

There have been many, many films about these politicians, of course, but much fewer about the team behind them. In Our Brand Is Crisis, "Calamity" Jane Bodine (Sandra Bullock) is one such campaign manager, or she was before her retirement. She's tracked down by a desperate team working on a presidential campaign in Bolivia, for a candidate whose poll numbers stand despairingly low with mere weeks before the election. Living healthily up in the mountains, making clay pots -- as if a former campaign manager could take up any hobby other than forming something beautiful out of raw materials -- and being "serene," she is nevertheless dragged back into the fray when she's told the manager for the candidate comfortably leading in the polls is her old nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton).

Brought down to South America, suffering from acute elevation sickness, she stumbles around for a bit before finally reigniting her competitiveness. She quickly determines the best course of action for her boorish, uncharismatic candidate, Castillo (Joaquim de Almeida): relentlessly fear-mongering the economic crisis in Bolivia, while positioning Castillo as the only candidate with the guts to do what's necessary.

As the polls begin to tighten, Jane starts spiraling more and more out of control (we're told she has spent time at a psychiatric hospital after one particularly rough early campaign led to the suicide death of the daughter of one of her opponents) yet always maintaining a proper handle on her client, as she leads him to potential glory.

There are a good deal of other side characters, including the pre-existing American campaign staff (Anthony Mackie, Ann Dowd and Scoot McNairy); Eduardo (Reynaldo Pacheco), a young, innocent volunteer who becomes more involved as the campaign grows; and LeBlanc (Zoe Kazan), a young woman Jane flies in to do her investigative work. But the story is truly Jane's alone, befitting a star with the glowing wattage of Bullock. She's largely up to the challenge, though the idea of an addled white American laying down truth to a South American country remains something of a bad look.

The idea here is that years ago Jane once started with genuine enthusiasm and hope when she first started campaigning but gradually had that optimism burned down into a hard brick of cynicism over the years, hopping from one campaign to the next, convincing the rabble whom to vote for based on her growing arsenal of tricks and slight-of-hand feints. As the film progresses, and we see more of Castillo actually acknowledging his fellow countrymen, the film suggests this rekindles some of her earlier hopefulness, only with a candidate she still can't fully trust.

Green's film has a fair amount of amusing elements. As Pat, Thornton is deliciously slick and oily, a contemptuous adversary to Jane, who, as he likes to point out, is actually not all that different from him. They both turn campaigns into personal Machiavellian combat, liberally quoting everyone from Warren Beatty to Sun Tzu in order to make their point and stopping at nothing to win, even as they no longer bother to consider all these candidates they're propping up with their smoke and mirrors. "There's only one wrong: losing!" Jane yells to her staff near the beginning. As always, this time, it's personal.

Based on the Rachel Boynton documentary of the same name, a film also made in Bolivia, but starring real American campaigners (including former Clinton handler James Carville) as they prop up yet another empty-promise demagogue as a representative of the people, Green's film takes the jaw-dropping condescension and contempt of the American political process and turns it into a relatively amusing but glib treatise on the nature of one's ability to change for the better. Thing is, shoehorning one of the great Hollywood mythos -- our lives are journeys of hard realizations and positive change -- into a process so dementedly riddled with corruption and insincerity feels didactic at best and pandering at worst. Wrapping this project around such a huge, beguiling star also feels misguided, as if the production were built from the outside in, even when our emotional touchstone just happens to be one of the more recognizable faces in the world.

As good and persuasive as Bullock can be, it's hard to shake the idea that the packaging of the film is too closely aping the very thing the film is supposedly decrying. You can see what Green is going for: creating a desultory glance at the democratic political process we export to other countries, and nicely fitting it into the trunk of yet another satisfying star vehicle, but this uneven effort does a disservice to both of its core constituents.

MovieStyle on 10/30/2015

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