Can Oscar winner Sandra Bullock in top form overcome longtime American audience resistance to comedies about politics and maybe even get another nomination in the process?
It will be interesting to see if Warner Bros. can achieve these goals with David Gordon Green’s “Our Brand is Crisis,” which fictionalizes a documentary about a pair of battling American political consultants who shaped the 2002 Bolivian presidential contest.
Both consultants were men in real life, but one of the roles in this long-in-development project produced by George Clooney was rewritten to Bullock’s strengths as a comedian and dramatic actress. She goes to town as “Calamity” Jane Bodine, a ruthless consultant who is recruited out of retirement by a couple of other consultants (Anthony Mackie and Ann Dowd) four years after a tragic incident caused some sort of breakdown.
They convince Jane, who is renowned for jump-starting the campaigns of losers, to lend her expertise to an arrogant and charmless former Bolivian president who even looks like a bad guy (Joaquim de Almeida, often cast in American films as a drug lord) and is languishing in fifth place in the presidential polls.
Once she gets over her revulsion to her candidate, altitude sickness and lets Bullock show off some slapstick skills we haven’t seen in a while, Jane’s answer to the problem is an American-style campaign that offers the candidate up as the only solution to an imaginary “crisis” in Bolivia and includes lots of dirty tricks aimed at the charismatic frontrunner, including smearing him as a Nazi sympathizer.
Jane is energized by her longtime rivalry with the other candidate’s American consultant, whose ruthless tactics in an earlier election she suspects may have led to her breakdown. He’s played with malevolent charm by Billy Bob Thornton as another version of the real-life “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville, just as Thornton did in the Clinton-a-clef film “Primary Colors” (1998). Thornton has such great chemistry with Bullock (in his best film work in years) that I wish Thornton had more screen time, but he makes the most of what he gets. The excellent cast includes such pros as Scoot McNairy and Zoe Kazan.
This cynical look at the state of the art in political campaigning (in the U.S. as well as Bolivia) does not go particularly deep and the ending isn’t great, but director Green (“Pineapple Express”) does stage a handful of highly entertaining sequences, including a bus chase on a mountain road and Jane’s epic bender.
“Our Brand is Crisis,” which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, opens on Oct. 30.