Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/10/08
I've increasingly come to
believe that the US public is made up of two kinds of people: those
who shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're more concerned with the
eternal struggle between Democrat & Republican than the country and
those who shouldn't be allowed to vote because they have no idea who's
running. Playing to these two constituencies, candidates need only
take enough of a break from fattening their coffers with corporate cash
to assure the partisans that they'll fight to their last breath to settle
decades-old feuds with the other party and the clueless masses that they're
“just folks” who love shooting guns, downing brews and rooting for The
Local Sports Team. Good luck waiting for partisan Hollywood to make
a real satire about partisanship, but you couldn't ask for a better one
about pandering politicians and clueless voters than Swing Vote.
Telling an impossible but allegorically sharp fairy tale about a lone man
who must choose the next US President, it's got surprising teeth and wit
to go with its' chewy nuget center.
Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner)
loves his 11 year-old daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), but he's a bad
father, so much so that he's really the child in their relationship.
He drinks too much, forgets all her activities and can't get to work on
time at the egg packing factory. He combines all three flaws in one
really bad day when his hijinks finally get him fired from the factory,
sending him off drinking so he forgets that he'd promised Molly he'd vote
in the Presidential election, a vote she's counting on to be part of a
class project. When he fails to show, she sneaks past sleeping poll
workers and tries to cast the vote for him, but a tripped-over plug leaves
her with a voting stub in hand and his ballot stuck in the machine, uncast.
That night, while he's sleeping it off, something extraordinary is happening:
the race between Republican incumbent Andrew Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and
his Democratic challenger Donald Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper) has ended with
a virtual electoral tie to be settled by New Mexico's 5 electoral votes...
and New Mexico's vote is tied down to the last ballot. Except there's
one vote that hasn't been cast: Bud's. Election officials try
to quietly set up a chance for him to revote in 10 days, but reporter Kate
Madison (Paula Patton) figures out the identity of the mysterious “swing
voter” who'll decide the Presidential election. From that moment
on, the candidates are out in force, led by their campaign heads Republican
Martin Fox (Stanley Tucci) and Democrat Art Crumb (Nathan Lane).
Personal meet and greets, campaign ads and position flip-flops targeted
at his every passing whim, celebrity endorsements, and a general media
circus compete for the attention of a man who knows nothing about any of
the issues. As the heartbroken Molly convinces Bud to call for a
debate on the eve of his one-man election, the nation asks: is this
any way to choose a president?
No, but it's exactly the
way we do it. Swing Vote co-writer/director Joshua Michael
Stern (Jason Richman helped out with the script) does a great job of taking
the poll-driven lowest-common denominator farce of our electoral process
and showing its' absurdity by putting the entire spotlight on a single
guy rather than the nation as a whole. With the partisans having
already cast their votes, Boone and Greenleaf are free to throw all party
rhetoric to the wind and just win the vote of a man who didn't even know
their names a week earlier, which means outrageous flip-flops backed by
shameless campaign ads to play to any political inclination Bud might seem
to have. He likes to fish? Well, Boone will abandon his environmental
positions and make the river he fishes in a National Preserve. Sounds
like he's pro-life? Time for Greenleaf to run a ad where he stands
on a playground full of children vanishing into thin air as he vows to
protect “God's intelligent design”. Willie Nelson invites Bud to
a party on Greenleaf's behalf, while Richard Petty lets him drive his car
to an Air Force One meeting with Boone. All the while, the concerns
of the average American, even the concerns that affect Bud's own life,
go ignored while his daughter's despair for both her father and the political
process grows.
Stern hits two different
kinds of notes that work really well together in making his film sing:
the political satire is really funny (those campaign ads are priceless),
and Costner is at his most delightful as a shiftless idiot who becomes
the most powerful man in the free world for a week and a half. On
the other hand, there's a real, palpable vein of working-class despair
running through the proceedings, exemplified by a late-night meeting with
Molly's drug-addled mother (Mare Winningham) and the rambling heartbreak
of a father (Bruce McIntosh) whose Bring My Father to School Day speech
about what he does for a living becomes a plea to Molly to get her father
to intercede on his behalf. Molly herself has a show-stopping speech
at the same event trying to defend Bud's non-existent civic responsibility,
and his own climactic remarks at the debate are surprisingly raw and sincere.
It really WOULDN'T matter who was President if there weren't so many people
struggling in the country, and Swing Vote never loses sight of them
to allow the proceedings to become a simple horserace the same way, say,
every single US journalist does. The film effectively stages a media
circus that feels real, rather than your standard canned movie media circus
(coughThe Astronaut Famercough).
****SPOILER ALERT, ENDING
ABOUT TO BE DISCUSSED**** The script also dodges two pitfalls that
could easily have sunk it. Molly's failed casting of Bud's vote is
a good jumping-off point that gets him into the mix without having already
made a decision and also forces him to be part of the process for fear
of arrest. But if that secret was ever allowed to come out, all that
would have followed would have been lacking, and Stern and Richman wisely
leave that card unplayed. Best of all, they choose not to show us
either the debate that follows Bud's speech or to enlighten us on his final
choice. It's a movie about the importance of voting, not about who
you vote for, and it doesn't allow its' call to understand the issues to
turn it into a wonk-fest. ****END OF SPOILERS****
Performances are strong across
the board. Kevin Costner takes a lot of crap, but he's one of the
great movie stars of his generation precisely because he stands for something
on-screen. He's at the top of his game as a man who tries for the
first time in his life to look beyond himself at a larger world he doesn't
quite understand. Carroll makes an auspicious film debut as his daughter,
superficially precocious, but always showing us the little girl inside
whose heart breaks as her Daddy fails to measure up time and time again.
Grammer and Hopper do great jobs with the candidates, with Grammer in particular
seeming like there might be a good man in there somewhere, while Hopper
wonderfully embodies that struggle to seem “normal” that tends to undercut
Democratic nominees (watching him try to shoot a gun is a hoot).
Tucci and Lane shine as their ethically barren right-hands. Lane
has a wonderful speech about why he cares more about winning the election
than being on the right side of it, and his words resonate through every
corner of our increasingly “winning isn't everything, it's the only thing”
society. Patton grapples effectively with her ethics, Judge Reinhold
is a hoot as Bud's egg factory pal and Charles Esten shines as the Secret
Service agent who grows to know Molly better than her own father in just
a few days.
Swing Vote does an
unusually good job of side-stepping its' built-in Hollywood inclination
to favor the left to the right, showing both sides as so ethically bankrupt
that their underlying principals barely matter. Some will no doubt
roll their eyes at its' pro-informed electorate message and point out that
the choice we face in November is, as always, less than ideal. But
it was the lack of an informed electorate that put those candidates on
the ballot, that has kept their positions twisting in the wind and that
has allowed them to run campaigns more about Britney Spears and that out-of-context
“100 years in Iraq” quote than any real substance. Do me a couple
favors: see Swing Vote, because it's one of the best movies
of the year. Then read the paper once in a while and get TiVo so
you don't see any more campaign ads. We'll still get the country
we deserve, but maybe we'll deserve a better one. |
