Our Brand Is Crisis
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Like a dry run a year ahead of what’s either going to be the most furious modern U.S. presidential election or the most boring, Our Brand Is Crisis arrives to teach us about democracy and its primary currency: highly weaponized campaigning. Tonally, it’s a mess — part M*A*S*H (the movie, not the TV show), with American practical jokers at madcap war with each other in a foreign country where the volatility is in fact deadly, part Hoosiers-style exiled-genius comeback and part Schoolhouse Rock lesson. Then again, as Schoolhouse Rock pastiches go, it’s pretty blue-chip, with George Clooney the prime mover behind the scenes and Sandra Bullock (excellent in a lead originally developed for Clooney) the front-and-center star. Director David Gordon Green lends Peter Straughan’s witty screenplay some visual slapstick without sacrificing intelligence, and even the over-heavy last act doesn’t smother the proceedings. Crisis suggests a reglossing of the Clooney-directed The Ides of March, a deadly serious K Street clunker, but is actually a fictionalized magpie-ing, down to the shared title, of Rachel Boynton’s fine 2005 documentary. There, James Carville worked his dark magic in Bolivia; here, Billy Bob Thornton — two arched eyebrows and a brimstone cigarette — cues our sense of that pollster, but it’s Bullock who is, of course, in charge. Not a landslide, but far from a sympathy vote.
