by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Our Brand Is Crisis, a production of George Clooney’s company (he was
supposed to star in it, too, but at the last minute he dropped out and Billy
Bob Thornton replaced him) inspired by a 2002 Presidential campaign in Bolivia
in which former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada mounted a comeback and
hired James Carville’s company to run his campaign — and another American
political consultant was hired by Lozada’s principal opponent. The campaign was
filmed by Rachel Boynton for a 2005 documentary, also called Our
Brand Is Crisis, and screenwriter Peter
Straughan thought it would make a good premise for a feature film, though the
script languished in the Hollywood slush pile for years until it made the
so-called “Blacklist,” a poll of the best unproduced screenplays out there, in
2008. Finally, seven years later, it got turned into a film which went nowhere
at the box office but was actually a pretty engaging movie even though it was
that most frustrating of all films, a good movie that could have been
considerably better. The director, David Gordon Green (his first feature work),
made a major casting switch; he turned the lead consultant from a man into a
woman, partly so Sandra Bullock could play her but also to create a romantic
antagonism between the two rival American consultants for the different
candidates.
She is “Calamity” Jane Bodine — so nicknamed because of the series
of disasters that seems to follow her around — and her career is at a low ebb
because she’s lost the last four elections in a row ever since rival consultant
Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton, with his head shaved to more closely resemble
James Carville) got under her skin during a mayoral campaign in which both were
representing opposing candidates, Candy pulled a dirty trick at the last minute
and his man won. We’re never told if Candy and Bodine ever actually made it to
the bedroom together — though he clearly wants to and so does she, though she’s
also quite obviously afraid of their attraction — in one of the weirder lines of
dialogue he tells her towards the end of the film, “I’m going to be spending a
lot of time pleasuring myself and thinking of you.” “That’s very flattering,”
she dead-pans in response. She signs on to the campaign of Pedro Castillo
(Joaquim de Almeida, who judging from his name seems more Brazilian than
Bolivian), a conservative ex-president who when he was in office before turned
the police loose on anti-government demonstrators, resulting in many deaths.
He’s looked on quite suspiciously by the Bolivian workers and peasants, who
have their own candidate, Victor Rivera (Louis Arcella), a progressive populist
who promises to reform the Bolivian constitution and keep the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) out of Bolivia. The Bolivians seem far more hip than Americans
to what the IMF actually does when they come into a country; in exchange for
loans to help the country out of a debt, they demand that the government
institute so-called “structural adjustment” programs that include “austerity”
cuts to government budgets — especially social programs — as well as privatizing state-owned industries and
deregulating the economy generally, so multinational corporations can invest
there and pay tiny wages and few or no taxes.
With Bodine on Castillo’s side
and Candy on Rivera’s, the campaign turns into (among other things) a personal
rivalry between the two — it reaches its low point when Castillo’s and Rivera’s
buses find themselves on the same narrow, winding mountain road in Bolivia and
Jane insists that Castillo’s driver overtake and pass Rivera’s bus, and as it
passes Jane drops her pants and moons Candy. (Sandra Bullock was asked the
inevitable question — yours or a stunt ass? — and insisted she did the scene
herself, though the film does
credit 18 stunt people.) The title comes from the fact that Jane soon realizes
that in order to get Castillo elected she must dash the hopes of Bolivians that
a president like Rivera can do anything to make their lives better, and instead
sell them on the idea that Bolivia faces an existential crisis and only a
president with experience in the job can pull the country out of it. Given what
producer Clooney has been in recent headlines for — not only supporting Hillary
Clinton for president over genuine populist Bernie Sanders (thereby aligning
himself similarly to Sandra Bullock’s character in his movie) but sponsoring a
fundraiser and charging $353,000 for dinner seats at Bill and Hillary Clinton’s
table — I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between Our Brand
Is Crisis and the current U.S. Presidential
election: like Pedro Castillo, Hillary Clinton is hated by a large number of
Americans, and she’s so well known a public figure there’s almost no way her
campaign can “redefine” her and get more Americans to like her. So, like Jane
Bodine in the movie, Clinton has to get the American people deathly afraid for
their future and so fearful that they’ll reject both Left-wing populist Sanders and Right-wing populist
Donald Trump and vote for a status quo candidate instead. Aside from that, Our Brand Is Crisis is an interesting, engaging feature film that makes
me want to see the documentary it was “inspired” by — though the elements of a
political campaign, Jane’s fish-out-of-water status in Bolivia (she spends the
first two reels or so sucking on oxygen and vomiting because she’s not used to
the thin atmosphere at Bolivia’s high elevation) and the romantic (or at least
sexual) antagonism between Jane and Pat don’t quite jell as well as
screenwriter Straughan obviously thought (or hoped) they would.
What it is
strongest about is how irrelevant not only the voters but the politicians
themselves become in the seemingly endless rivalries between consultants — at
one point, as they’re preparing for a debate, Castillo gets tired of Jane telling
him exactly what he is supposed
to say and what he’s not supposed to say, and stressing that he needs to “stay
on message” (as this skill is called) and bend every question he’s asked to say
what he wants to say whether it’s
responsive or not, and he starts chewing her out and saying that she’s working
for him, not the other way around. “No, nobody hired me,” Jane replies. “I
cannot be hired. Unless you mean in the uh, you know, the technical sense, then
yes, I probably was hired.” There’s also a sort of grim fascination in the
dirty tricks Jane and Pat think up to play on each other’s candidates,
including accusations of extramarital affairs (Castillo, it turns out, has a
long-time mistress, but his wife, separated from him and living in the U.S.,
understands and approves), cult membership (Candy digs up a photo of Castillo
visiting his son in L.A. and appearing in the robes of the cult his son is part
of, and uses it to suggest that Castillo is part of the cult whose beliefs
include that its higher-level members can fly, sort of like Scientology) and
Nazi sympathies. As they’re sitting together before the candidates’ debate,
Jane has a paperback copy of Goethe’s Faust open and claims to have read therein, “It may be
possible to hold power based on guns; but it is far better and more gratifying
to win the heart of the nation.” Candy, of course, immediately rips off the
line and has Rivera use it in the debate — only it turns out the original quote
wasn’t from Goethe, but from Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Eventually Castillo squeezes out a minor
victory with just 25 percent of the vote — apparently Bolivia doesn’t have a
runoff so you can win the presidency in a multi-candidate field with that
little actual support — and no sooner does he take office that he secretly
starts negotiating with IMF representatives despite his pledge during the
campaign that he’d only invite the IMF in if the Bolivian people voted for it
in a referendum.
This disillusions his long-time supporter Eddie Camacho (Reynaldo
Pacheco), who in a lot of ways is the most interesting character in the movie:
he’s a kid from the Bolivian slums and virtually all his relatives and friends,
including his brothers, think Castillo is a rich people’s stooge, but Eddie
supports Castillo and is willing to film Rivera’s rallies for Castillo’s
opposition research team because years before, when Eddie was just a baby,
Castillo held him and presented him to the crowd during one of his previous
campaigns. Only at the very end of the film Eddie witnesses Castillo talking to
the IMF, leaks the info to his anti-Castillo brothers, and this gets out and
starts a protest movement which Castillo tries to quell by having the police
assault the crowds with tear gas. Jane watches this from the SUV that is carrying
her to the Bolivian airport for her next assignment and, just when I was
thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have her go Bogart on us and regain her
old ideals,” they have her go Bogart on us and regain her old ideals. She walks
out of the truck and the next time we see her, she’s being interviewed in her
new capacity with something called the “Latin American Solidarity Network,”
defending Latin American people against corrupt politicians like Pedro Castillo
and the Americans that help elect them. Our Brand Is Crisis isn’t that great a film — Bullock is a better actress than Julia Roberts but she
plays this part pretty much the same way Roberts would have, and the character
conflicts are about as flat as a piece of cardboard — but it’s haunting even
though the moral dilemma facing political consultants and their uncertain
relationships with the candidates has been done before in movies like The
Candidate with Robert Redford, Bulworth with Warren Beatty (from which this film quotes
several lines of dialogue) and probably the closest antecedent, Power, a film with Richard Gere as a consultant who was
running several campaigns at once and representing candidates with different —
sometimes diametrically opposed — ideologies and views on the issues. Still,
Our Brand Is Crisis is a fascinating film
to watch, especially in the middle of a U.S. Presidential election that is
pitting an old-line moderate Establishment hack against populist challengers
from both Left and Right!
