Our Brand Is Cri­sis – first look review

The mis­ery-sod­den enter­tain­ment of con­tem­po­rary elec­tion­eer­ing is ush­ered in as a dis­mal metaphor for Machi­avel­lian, self-serv­ing cor­rup­tion in all walks of life in David Gor­don Green’s down-the-mid­dle clas­si­cal polit­i­cal com­e­dy, Our Brand Is Cri­sis. Even though it’s a film which pro­fess­es to know all the angles, there’s some­thing rather light and com­fort­able about the enter­prise, that it’s maybe not deliv­er­ing as rad­i­cal a state­ment as its mak­ers believe.

The sug­ges­tion that cor­rupt, patri­ar­chal, busi­ness-mind­ed politi­cians can­not be cleaved from their ingrained beliefs in the name of social democ­ra­cy and com­pas­sion is cyn­i­cism 101, but this lib­er­al trump card is laid over and over in a sto­ry whose guid­ing prin­ci­ple is that the process of rul­ing a nation is one that is nat­u­ral­ly guid­ed by con­tempt – jus­tice and hap­pi­ness are a mere myths, and the poor will always get the thin end of the wedge.

San­dra Bullock’s ​“Calami­ty” Jane Bod­ine is so-called because she has made a name for her­self as a key prop­a­ga­tor of dirty pol­i­tics, a slick fix­er hired with the sole task of win­ning elec­tions and leav­ing the moral­is­tic bull­shit (and black-lash) for some­one else to deal with. That peo­ple might die at the hands of the tyrants she places into pow­er is mere bagatelle. She has her design­er shades to deflect the grim real­i­ties of what she’s doing.

We meet her after a peri­od of per­son­al heal­ing, where she has left the rat race behind to make pot­tery bowls in the moun­tains and recov­er from a course of EST for mild psy­chosis. There’s an elec­tion in La Paz, and the Amer­i­can-endorsed stooge is mas­sive­ly trail­ing in the polls. That’s mean­ing­less, though. She’s brought back into the fold with the irre­sistible chance to take down one of her key polit­i­cal rivals, Pat Can­dy (Bil­ly Bob Thorn­ton), a bald­ing bas­tard who knows her tac­tics and is the only one able to respond to them with any vim or vigour. There’s a light sex­u­al fris­son between the pair – mild­ly redo­lent of those titans of bick­er, Tra­cy and Hep­burn – yet direc­tor David Gor­don Green veers away from try­ing to buoy the pol­i­tick­ing with a roman­tic sub-strand.

And the film is essen­tial­ly a com­pendi­um of skir­mish­es in which tit-for-tat vio­lence is met­ed out between the pair, with the hap­less can­di­dates (the ​“pup­pets”) becom­ing the actu­al human tar­gets. Bod­ine wins the trust of her employ­er Castil­lo (Joaquim de Almei­da) by reel­ing off a stream of inspi­ra­tional quotes by War­ren Beat­ty, and it’s an appo­site touch con­sid­er­ing the film resem­bles Beatty’s own Bul­worth from 1998, itself a lib­er­al cine-brick­bat (pow­ered by hip-hop) aimed at the insid­i­ous cor­po­rate forces which have infil­trat­ed the halls of pow­er. Alas, there is no hip-hop in this film (or local equivalent).

Though Bul­lock is embed­ded with­in a large ensem­ble, she’s the key focus of the film, the side play­ers, among them Antho­ny Mack­ie, Anne Dowd, Scoot McNairy and Zoe Kazan, don’t get much of a look-in. It makes the film about her, and her feisty mono­logues and unpre­dictable behav­iour make her a lov­able if eth­i­cal­ly taint­ed hero­ine. But this is not a film about polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion, it’s a film chart­ing Jane’s real­i­sa­tion that what she is doing has far-reach­ing neg­a­tive ram­i­fi­ca­tions and whether reveal­ing a new­found car­ing-shar­ing side would be too lit­tle too late. And also real­is­ing that while she things she’s the pup­peteer, there are oth­ers above her who are pulling those strings.

In terms of Green’s recent work, it’s cer­tain­ly less inter­est­ing than his run of whim­si­cal minia­tures, Prince Avalanche, Joe and Man­gle­horn. There’s an anony­mous feel to the way it’s been shot, almost like he’s been hired in for the strict pur­pose of get­ting a job done in a sat­is­fac­to­ry man­ner. And while there’s a cer­tain poet­ry to that sit­u­a­tion, it does mean that a cer­tain pro­fun­di­ty and artistry has been lost in the transition.