Hollywood Happenings: ‘Crisis is our Brand’

It doesn’t matter how much you love Sandra Bullock.

SANDRA BULLOCK as Jane and ANTHONY MACKIE as Ben in Warner Bros.

One of our favorite games on Ellen is Never Have I Ever so we’re obviously delighted that Ellen DeGeneres got Sandra Bullock, Anthony Mackie, and Billy Bob Thornton to play! She cares about winning, and the movie reinforces the narrative that politics is just a game. Look, I fully realize much of this non-existent backstory is a metaphor for politicians being glorified tools, but that doesn’t mean entire character motivations should go ignored.

The movie is a fictionalized gloss on a 2005 documentary, also titled “Our Brand Is Crisis”. Its primary subject was chief strategist Jeremy Rosner, who headed up the GCS team’s work on behalf of “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada, a former President attempting to reclaim the office (and overcome the fumbles of his previous administration); via Boyton’s omnipresent camera, we witness focus groups, policy discussions, and strategy sessions, positioning the film as something akin to The War Room, another fly-on-the-wall campaign documentary with James Carville providing color commentary. Instead, we get overly slapstick moments, like seeing Bodine throwing up because of altitude sickness (is puking even amusing to anyone?), hints of romance between Bodine and Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), who is her counterpart on the other side, and a weird montage of Bodine’s drunken night.

Our Brand is Crisis is a political drama directed by David Gordon Green (Manglehorn, Prince Avalanche).

It’s far less palatable the more evident it becomes that the movie itself is scarcely more interested in Bolivians’ stake in all this whisper-campaigning, tour bus-racing, bobblehead-launching chicanery than Bodine or Candy. At the same time, he wants us to invest ourselves in Jane’s late and absurdly improbable crisis of conscience, as she watches a naive young Bolivian’s illusions about democracy crumble. See her in this one, in which everything is nearly going wrong, but it never quite does.

Frustrated, she wondered, “Why is the only comedy available for women romantic comedy?” Check out her priceless final remark in that llama scene. You can enjoy the light surface or see the rueful underpinnings that give her lightness a hint of something mysterious. For director David Gordon Green, it’s a step in a new, more sophisticated direction, and for producers Grant Heslov and George Clooney, the film is an entry into their stable of slick political romps that are topical whether they are contemporary or not. “The truth is what I tell the electorate the truth is”, she likes to say. But the greatest weakness of the film is where it should be strongest, in the relationship between the rival consultants, played by Bullock and Thornton. But their interaction isn’t particularly clever, and most of the time it’s just dispiriting.

That’s why Bullock and her agent started looking at roles for men.

The problems are compounded by an ending that is hard to buy, not only in terms of story but in the direction it steers the main character. (They aren’t Hepburn and Tracy, but they’ll do.) When it doesn’t, “Our Brand Is Crisis” veers into the kind of insincerity and staged emotions that it claims to be mocking.