Our Brand is Crisis, Review: Dirty politricks

On one hand, Our Brand is Crisis dispels all delusions anybody might still have about elections being the ultimate manifestation of democracy…and how! On the other, it makes mud-slinging look exceedingly simple to indulge in, with pictures and quotes being the only real weapons you need. Of course, there are the obligatory debates, baring of hearts on live television, and the dirty tricks department of state machinery, that play their parts. In the end, a mere 2% of votes separate the two candidates in the Bolivian Presidential election, with both campaigns being managed by competing American ‘consultants’.

Loosely based on the 2006 documentary of the same name, directed by Rachel Boynton, Our Brad is Crisis is a fictionalised account of the involvement of the American political campaign strategist firm, Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS, see below), in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, which pitted Gonzalo (Goni) Sánchez de Lozada against Manfred Reyes Villa.

In the film, an American political consulting firm, and agents of the American government (Anthony Mackie, Ann Dowd), hire Jane Bodine (Sandra Bullock) to manage the election campaign of Bolivian politician Pedro Castillo (Joaquim de Almeida). She has quit the profession after a series of electoral losses, lives as a recluse in a mountain cottage for the last six years, and is not keen on the assignment, till she learns that her arch nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton) is the opposition's political consultant.

Candy has out manoeuvred her four times, and she is bent on regaining her prestige. (In the real Bolivian election of 2002, there was only one set of consultants). He believes in a no holds barred approach, and Bodine, also known as Calamity Jane, is more than willing to follow suit. It’s tough going, for her candidate is not a likeable person, and his opponent is decidedly more popular. That’s nothing new to the spin doctor, and, as a real-life GCS honcho said, “Our brand is crisis.”

Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Frank, The Men Who Stare at Goats)’s screenplay takes historical liberties galore, some of them obviously to induct juice, and others to upscale/downscale the explosive political content. Fictionalising a true event, a mere 13 years old, is risky business, especially when several oft-repeated clichés are employed: the consultant retires into the mountains to live like a hermit, she comes back only to get even with her nemesis, her nemesis moves into her hotel and takes up a room just across hers, the candidate refuses to accept her advice time and again—only to give-in a minute later, she has no plan or strategy devised till the very last minute, etc. No character is fully fleshed out--the nearest we come to knowing a person is Castillo, and he too is portrayed as ambivalent, even confused. Idealistic and positive for Jane, the film’s ending still comes across as contrived.

David Gordon Green (Manglehorn, Joe, Prince Avalanche) relies heavily on one-liners, and the film’s pace is somewhat uneven. Screen time division does not allow any character to really impress. Though Bullock is executive producer on the film, it is Billy Bob Thornton who has the incisive performance edge, thanks to negative traits being allowed to surface cold-bloodedly. Marrying documentary style with fiction was fraught with danger, and maybe that is why the film comes across more as fiction.

Sandra Bullock (Gravity, The Blind Side, The Proposal), strikes a chord only occasionally. In an attempt to humanise the part, the script makes her bland, uninteresting and even boring, till she lets herself loose, and gets into the game of one-upmanship. Billy Bob Thornton (Jayne Mansfield’s Car, Armageddon, Bandits) sports a bald look and mouths some mean/risqué dialogue, doing so with aplomb. Portugal-born Joaquim de Almeida (Atlas Shrugged: Who is John Galt?, Clear and Present Danger Che: Part 2) is made to stay mum for the better part of the first half, and then given good scope to start living his put on act. Playwright and screenwriter Zoe Kazan as the whiz kid who appears from nowhere and is mainly seen interpreting the Spanish, is a girl to watch. She has expressive eyes and a pretty countenance, which is flexible and emotive. Anthony Mackie and Ann Dowd have two good scenes. For the rest, they just play along.

Buying of votes is a condemnable practice that most of us are familiar with. Not so the fine, and despicable, art of influencing and manipulating voters, using every dirty trick in the book, and inventing some as you go along. As Jane says in the film, “If a vote could make a difference, they would have outlawed it long ago”—or words to that effect. But when one country (USA in this case) makes it its own business to run the campaign of a candidate in another country, in order to protect its own interests (oil, the IMF), you cannot help feeling a sense of outrage.

Our Brand is Crisis deals with a terribly sensitive issue. And such issues cannot be brought on to cinema with a middle-of-the-road approach. It is bold, though not bold enough. More realistically, can one expect an American film to really stick its neck out by naming names and lambasting foreign policy? I’ll leave you with that thought.

Rating: **1/2

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neRKSsgNc3M

From the GCS website

GCS Issue Management is an international company specializing in campaign management, crisis management, issue management, media consultation, spokesmanship and public relations. We manage campaigns from start to finish-- beginning with several stages of research and formulation of strategy, through implementation of strategy and messaging in the various forms of media. GCS was established in 1999 by topflight world specialists in campaign management: surveyor Stanley Greenberg, American political strategist James Carville, media specialist Bob Shrum and Israeli media advisor Tal Silberstein—hence the company name GCS (Greenberg, Carville, Shrum).
(Clients include Tony Blair, the Israeli Labor Party and the Canadian Liberal Party).

From the 2006 documentary, Our Brand is Crisis, by Rachel Boynton

"We have to start negative campaigns against him. We have to make him from clean to a dirty candidate, that's our task." --Tal Silberstein.