It's the Election, Stupid

ENLARGE PHOTO+

A sub-ordinary Joe (Costner) becomes a 10-day media wonder as America waits for him to cast his ballot.

Ben Glass / Touchstone

• Share

It's said that if you want to kick-start a conversation, or empty a movie house, just talk politics. Yet in this presidential-election year, filmmakers are peppering the multiplex electorate with pictures that take sides. Oliver Stone is finishing up W, a biopic of President Bush. The documentary Stealing America: Vote by Vote, already playing in some cities, argues that voting machines are hardly more accurate than Ouija boards. There are even a couple of right-wing movies, which are almost illegal in Hollywood: An American Carol, an anti--Michael Moore comedy from David Zucker of the Airplane! and Naked Gun series, and Hype: The Obama Effect, from anti-Clinton provocateur David Bossie.

And right now, we have Swing Vote, an election movie that wants to take both sides and the great indifferent middle.

Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner) is a loser, a wastrel, a jerk--and not one of the purportedly adorable kind in the Judd Apatow movies. The stupor Bud drinks himself into each evening leaves him barely able to drag himself to work the next morning, let alone care for his young daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll). His employer has been "insourcing" Mexicans who'll work for less money and firing hapless guys like Bud. It's no wonder that feeling disenfranchised, disaffected and perennially dissed, he belongs to what would be by far the largest U.S. political party: the We Don't Voters.

Through unlikely circumstances proposed by director Joshua Michael Stern and co-writer Jason Richman, the presidential race is so tight that New Mexico's electoral votes will make the difference. The state is dead-even in the popular tally, and a ballot with Bud's name on it gets stuck in a machine without registering his preference. The election has come down, literally, to one man, one vote. Yes, Bud (with a lot of help from the much savvier Molly) will choose the next President. He has 10 days to hand in his vote.

If you hear a loud snap at this moment, it's the audience's credulity, as Swing Vote falls from agreeable fable into wan satire. Why 10 days? To show that the electoral process is a shameless sham in which politicians pretzel their principles to get elected. The two candidates come courting Bud. Drawing their own inferences from his cryptic remarks, the Republican (Kelsey Grammer) suddenly plumps for gay marriage, while the Democrat (Dennis Hopper) turns pro-life. The movie says these are decent men forced to reverse field by their Machiavellian advisers (Stanley Tucci as, essentially, Karl Rove; Nathan Lane as, more or less, Robert Shrum). If this is the case, then they're not decent, and neither party deserves to win.

Borrowing the idealism of Frank Capra movies and the cynicism of Preston Sturges comedies, but not near those old masters as an entertainer or political guru, Stern suggests that the real hero is the ordinary Joe who goes to the polls and votes these rascals in. Swing Vote has aspirations to be Molly--or, in a pinch, Bud. But it's closer to the parties' idea men, trying to guess what the people want, then desperately laying it on. That leaves Costner, for all his charm and flinty ambiguity, a loser in this poll.

We won't say who finally wins the Bud election. But given the film's ostensible celebration of independence, it would be nice if he voted for Nader. Then the whole sad charade--the electoral process--would have to start over again.