The White House Mess

Recount. Directed by Jay Roach. Starring Kevin Spacey, Denis Leary, and Bob Balaban.

Watching those senior citizens with the infamous butterfly ballots and John Hurt play Creeping Jesus Warren Christopher was painful at times. My wife is a registered Democrat, and I'd like to think her party is collectively smarter than it's portrayed in Recount.

With a movie like this, the audience isn't tuning in to figure out who won the election. That's a foregone conclusion. Not unlike the infamous joke in The Aristocrats, the set-up of this film is more interesting than the punchline. While I enjoyed it, I thought the film's attempts at being evenhanded made it paradoxically more lopsided.

How is it lopsided? The film obviously tilts towards the Democrats, but that isn't the problem. In order to demonstrate where the film went wrong, I'd like to talk a bit about what it got right. Casting Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary as Ron Klain and Michael Whouley, the two campaign operatives leading the recount battle in Florida for Al Gore, was brilliant. Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary work well together, as anyone who has seen The Ref already knows.

Spacey is pretty slick, and while Klain is clearly outraged over all the injustices and the final outcome, he never sounds like a martyr. I was initially puzzled by Leary's inclusion in the cast, until I watched Leary do Whouley's little spiel about chad. Only Leary could make a subject that arcane sound so funny, and Spacey makes a great straight man during that scene.

So where does the film go off the rails? I think the film tries to be too fair to Republicans. The devil always has the best lines. Consider the line that is given to Bob Balaban, when he makes his entrance as Ben Ginsberg, a campaign consultant for George W. Bush:

The stains of Bill Clinton will be washed away.

That line is just bland, insipid, and painfully earnest. With dialogue like that, it's hard to make the case that Ben Ginsberg and James Baker were cunning, Machiavellian strategists out to steal the election from Al Gore.

The events surrounding the 2000 election are still, well, bizarre, and a good subject for satire. While the film does have it's comic moments, I can't help but think an opportunity was lost when the director Jay Roach opted for an evenhanded approach instead of going straight for the jugular. Recount is a good film, but while trying to stay away from being being a shrill partisan polemic, Roach missed a good chance to make a genuine satirical masterpiece.