This sharp political satire puts Sandra Bullock in a spin
High on an Oscar and levitated by Gravity, Sandra Bullock did the right thing taking her part in Our Brand Is Crisis – a smartly written, cheekily engaged, glibly enjoyable political satire which sank without trace at the US box office. She gives it her best shot. Almost everyone does. The film’s commercial fate feels completely unrelated to its merits. It’s more the subject: American spin-doctors battling down in Bolivia to swing a presidential election.
In fact, selling a tricky, off-putting proposition to a public who want none of it is very much this film’s whole charade. Bullock plays a highprofile political consultant, Jane Bodine, nicknamed “Calamity” for the chaos that tends to pile up around her. Take her arrival in La Paz, the highest capital in the world, which brings wave upon wave of altitude sickness. At the point when she ought to be unveiling her masterplan to the new client, a grim-faced political has-been, Pedro Castillo (Joaquim de Almeida), she spends about a reel or so languishing in helpless fits of nausea.
The rest of Castillo’s imported campaign team, engagingly played by Anthony Mackie, Ann Dowd and Scoot McNairy, nervously bide their time, waiting for much-needed inspiration to strike. Their man seems like a no-hoper – he’s in fifth place, 28 points behind in the polls. What possible strings can Jane pull?
This script, on which dramatist Peter Straughan flexes his Wolf Hall instincts for snappy repartee and Machiavellian intrigue, is loosely based on a 2005 documentary of the same name, about the marketing
ploys American strategists used in Bolivia for its 2002 election. Funnily enough, one was the famous Clinton campaigner James Carville, the man loosely sketched in Primary Colors by Billy Bob Thornton, who offers a virtual reprise of the role, as Pat Candy. Candy is Jane’s old nemesis, who has deviously pipped her to repeated victories and sent her career into a downward spiral: his presence on the opposing side is her main reason for showing up.
Bullock grabs her role with both hands. Bodine feels like one of her smartest characters: a person who knows her way deviously around an electorate’s conscience, but also has a nervous, slightly secretive one of her own. She thrives on the film’s esprit de corps as if she’d been holding out for a Howard Hawks comedy all this time.
Unexpectedly, it’s director David Gordon Green – one-time art-house prodigy turned auteur of the proudly lowbrow Pineapple Express and Your
Highness – who dishes up the goods.