Two stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang
This seems to be the season for transforming
well-regarded documentaries into starring vehicles for Hollywood A-listers.
But whereas Freeheld mostly retains the soul and warmth of its 2007 nonfiction
predecessor, while highlighting sensitive work from stars Julianne Moore and
Ellen Page, Our Brand Is Crisis is an
awkward, bewildering mess that benefits not at all from Sandra Bullock’s
presence.
She barely tries, falling back
incessantly on the half-amused sidelong glance that has become her go-to
expression in far better projects. Much of the time, in fact, Bullock appears
to have forgotten her lines, and instead attempts to “cover” by flailing
aimlessly.
This doesn’t speak well of
director David Gordon Green, apparently unable to handle his leading lady. Or
maybe Bullock didn’t like him. Whatever the reason, she just isn’t present ... even when lovingly framed,
front and center — and too frequently in tight close-up — by cinematographer
Tim Orr.
Bullock is far from this film’s
only problem. Peter Straughan’s script is a mess: His effort to transform this
serious premise into a satire is half-assed at best, but most often just
clumsy. And when satire fails — particularly if the topic is based on actual
events — the result becomes tasteless. And offensive.
Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary
of the same title tracks the jaw-dropping degree to which the American
consulting firm of Greenberg, Carville and Strum (GCS) did its best to rig the
2003 Bolivian presidential election on behalf of its client, Gonzalo “Goni”
Sanchez de Lozada, who’d held that top spot from 1993-97, but had come to be
seen as arrogant and out of touch with the common people.
Yep, you read that correctly:
American political consultants plying their dirty tricks to affect the outcome
of a presidential election in a foreign country. Clandestine U.S. involvement
in foreign politics is nothing new, of course; what made this particular case
so egregious was the degree to which GCS made little or no effort to conceal its
activities. Hell, these guys were proud
of their work.
The charismatic James Carville
was the beaming public face of GCS; that’s the role assigned here to Bullock,
playing burned-out campaign fixer “Calamity” Jane Bodine. Anxiety and a series
of high-profile failures sent her into isolated retirement; as this film
begins, she’s tempted back into the game by the opportunity for one more match
against her longtime professional nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton, who
apparently based his look on Carville).
Candy has been coaching Rivera
(Louis Arcella), the photogenic, populist front-runner in the current Bolivian
presidential campaign. Jane is brought in to work her strategizing magic on
behalf of Castillo (Joaquim de Almeida), dwelling in the polling cellar despite
— actually, because of — having
previously held the same office. The Bolivian people have experienced life
under Castillo, and they want no more of him.
Bodine recognizes the uphill
battle, but she has help, starting with former colleague Nell (Ann Dowd), who
knows which buttons to push in order to get Calamity Jane on a plane to
Bolivia. These two women respect each other; consulting team leader Ben
(Anthony Mackie), on the other hand, needs to be persuaded that this obviously
stressed and shattered newcomer can even feed herself, let alone function as a “brilliant”
campaign strategist.
Their group also includes the aggressively
smug Buckley (Scott McNairy), who views himself as God’s gift to brand
advertising: a dubious boast, given the deplorable print and TV spots he keeps
churning out. (This is one of the many disconnects in Straughan’s script:
Satire or not, Jane would have fired Buckley before the sun set on her first
full day with him.)
Lastly, we have LeBlanc (Zoe
Kazan), brought in by Jane to handle research and dirt-digging. LeBlanc is a
far more interesting character than Jane, because Kazan gives a far better
performance than Bullock. The diminutive LeBlanc appears to be sweetness, light
and innocence ... until she gets to work, at which point she demonstrates a
calculating darkness that the Devil himself would admire.
Kazan’s amused and contemptuous
smirk, each time somebody underestimates LeBlanc, is to die for.
Bullock’s Jane, on the other
hand, just dies. Altitude sickness and apparent disinterest keep Jane on the
sidelines far too long; we keep waiting — in vain — for Bullock’s spark and
spunk to emerge. Apparently Jane is “studying” the situation, saving her
comments until she’s able to rouse her equally disinterested client, played by
de Almeida with the same dull, wooden lassitude that afflicts Bullock.
Castillo comes alive only while
interacting with Eddie (Reynaldo Pacheco), a young campaign volunteer who
treasures the childhood memory of briefly meeting the former president during
his earlier reign. When Eddie’s in the room, de Almeida gives us a glimpse of
the human being beneath Castillo’s otherwise bland and mildly disdainful bearing.
Actually, it could be argued that
Eddie is this story’s key character: the one who undergoes the most significant
emotional arc. Instead, we’re apparently intended to root for Jane’s eventual
epiphany: to recognize that when one does dirty work with soulless monsters
such as Pat Candy, one inevitably turns into the same sort of monster.
But Bullock never sells that
intended transformation. Just as Jack Nicholson was a batshit lunatic from the
get-go in 1980’s The Shining, Bullock
is wearily disheartened from the moment we meet her. There isn’t a character arc; she’s the same throughout. And her “same” is
as dull and boring as Jane’s candidate.
Pacheco, on the other hand, is
heartbreaking when Eddie finally perceives who and what these people are, and —
more crucially — who Castillo really is.
As Satan’s emissary on Earth,
Thornton is disappointing: a muted shadow of the flamboyant, cheerfully
corrupting puppeteer that Candy should
be. Like so many other characters in this story, he never really comes alive;
he just sidles up to Jane, mutters sexually tinged innuendos and dire warnings
into her ear, forever trying to get into her head, and then slinks away again. Repeatedly.
It grows tiresome, and merely
reminds, anew, that Green hasn’t the faintest idea how to direct his actors ...
because, let’s face it, a substandard performance from Billy Bob Thornton is a very rare thing.
We also get the impression that
Thornton flew in for maybe a day, filmed a whole bunch of similar-looking
scenes on the same two or three sets, and then blasted off again. He never feels
like part of this film’s overall tapestry.
Green and Straughan also lose
control of their film on more than one occasion, most notably during a night of
drunken excess, when Jane winds up in her hotel room with Eddie, his brother
Pepe (Octavio Gómez Berríos) and their friend Abraham (Luis Chávez). It’s
impossible to make sense of this sequence, unless it’s intended to depict
Jane’s effort to “bond” with Bolivia’s common herd.
Which points to this film’s
biggest problem: It’s racist and patronizing. Aside from Eddie and Castillo’s
campaign manager Hugo (Dominic Flores), all the Bolivian characters are
one-dimensionally stupid, naïve and/or greedy. The recently released Rock the Kasbah suffers from the same
problem, with its depiction of Afghans; both films are structured around “cultured
and superior” white folks parachuting in to save “backward societies” from
themselves. Ouch.
As also was the case with Rock the Kasbah, the setting and premise
here are dangerously real-world serious: If one intends to satirize such
situations, one had better do it well. Instead, Green and Straughan blandly
conclude their film with Jane, Candy and their American colleagues heading out
of town toward their next assignment, oblivious to the catastrophic carnage
erupting in the wake of their campaign shenanigans.
This is funny?
Actually, though, that isn’t the full ending. Apparently wanting her
character to appear more virtuous, Bullock appears to have demanded an inept,
tacked-on “epilog” intended to demonstrate redemption: as blatantly cynical and
transparently phony a Hollywood ploy as every back-room act these characters
orchestrate during the course of the story.
The
true crisis here, is that this movie got made at all.
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