Are most politicians and their operatives liars who want only power, or do they believe in the causes they espouse? Nearly every story about politics and campaigns centers on this question. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The West Wing, the characters sincerely try to make a positive difference. In All the King’s Men and House of Cards, the characters cynically lie to convince people to vote for them. There’s a spectrum from idealism to cynicism, but political stories bunch around the ends.
The new film Our Brand Is Crisis, plants itself all the way at the cynical end. Sandra Bullock plays a political strategist, Jane, who has kept herself out of campaigning for a few years, for her own mental health. But she’s lured back in by a chance to defeat her nemesis, Pat Candy, a rival consultant played by Billy Bob Thornton. The odd thing is, this election is in Bolivia.
The film takes place in La Paz, as Jane and her team run a campaign for the Bolivian presidency. At the beginning, their candidate polls in fourth place. They work to reframe the election to be about a national crisis, saying that their candidate is the only one who can lead the country out of its problems – hence the title. And they “go negative”, attacking the other contenders to pull them down. But this story is about Jane and her rival. She tells the candidate at one point that he’s her puppet, and she says several times that she doesn’t really care about Bolivia at all. She just wants to win.
Our Brand Is Crisis was a difficult film for me to watch. Jane goes to great depths of dishonesty and conniving to defeat her enemy. Her candidate, also, inspires no love from me and, in the end, proves himself a terrible liar too. But, on the other side, Candy and his man are no better. This was a contest I wanted everyone to lose.
It’s such an ugly, cynical story, and in the back of my mind I was wondering about that. One of the production companies behind Our Brand Is Crisis is George Clooney’s Participant Media, which has made many films about hopeful, honorable politics. Character-development spoiler alert, but in the end, Jane changes. She walks away from power politics and tries to use her talents to help people. I think that, in the eyes of the film, this is what she should have been doing all along, and she had to hit rock bottom to see it. I agree with that assessment, but I didn’t believe Jane’s change of character. The film tries to paper over its cynical story with an idealistic finish, but it’s too thin.