Our Brand Is Crisis (2015, directed by David Gordon Green)
One of the things you learn quickly when you dive into the world of conspiracy theories and counter-intelligence ops and such is that the abyss doesn't have a bottom. No matter how deeply you go, no matter how many layers you think you've uncovered, there's always the possibility of another layer, another interpretation, another “But what if that's just what they want me to think?” pseudo-epiphany. At a certain point, you either succumb to paranoia and madness or break through into pure agnosticism about it all. (I'd like to think I got to the latter stage, but that's probably for a psychiatric professional to decide, not me.)
That seeming non sequitur of an opening to a review of a Sandra Bullock award-season vehicle will make a whole lot more sense in a bit. Trust me.
Opening with snippets of an interview that eventually prove to be a framing sequence, OUR BRAND IS CRISIS is about “Calamity” Jane Bodine, an American political strategist who suffered something of a breakdown and retired from the game. After six years on the sidelines though, she's dragged back in for another tilt against her nemesis, Pat Candy (played by Billy Bob Thornton), in the most unlikely of settings: Bolivia. Bodine's candidates have never beaten Candy's, which makes her a somewhat improbable choice, but the American consulting firm who brings her in is working for a struggling candidate stuck in single digits in the polls, so they really don't have anything to lose. Jane has trouble adjusting to, well, everything (the altitude, the language, the culture) but once she sees Candy up to his old tricks again her competitive fires get stoked and she springs into action.
The whole thing seems very boilerplate on the surface, a white savior narrative tied to a personal redemption arc simmered in modern WAG THE DOG-style cynicism. As a film though, it actually works for three main reasons. Bullock is absolutely tremendous as Bodine. She completely sells the journey from weary, wary recluse to someone finally at peace with herself, and you can see the weight of her past sins start to lift off her shoulders as the movie progresses. Bodine is the kind of complex, flawed character that seems designed to garner an Oscar nom, but Bullock's nuanced performance is the polar opposite of the Oscar-bait, hoo-ah histrionics I loathe. Thornton has a smaller role as her foil, but he somehow takes a character that on paper is a caricature and turns Candy into a genuine human being, albeit an amoral, conniving one. The third leg of the triad keeping the film afloat is Green. He's become utterly mercurial as a director, and auteur theory would smash itself to bits trying to make sense of a career that now includes GEORGE WASHINGTON, YOUR HIGHNESS and OUR BRAND IS CRISIS, but Green's ability to invest plausibility in moments and scenes that could easily devolve into cliche elevates the material greatly, whether its through a Notorious B.I.G. poster on the wall of an apartment in the La Paz slums or the drone of a fly trapped behind a mask in Bodine's hotel room. Green's eye for detail, ultimately, is what takes the film from mediocre to entirely watchable.
So, great. OUR BRAND IS CRISIS is typical award-season fare designed to get Bullock a nom, and it's a bit better than it has any right to be. Right?
Well, yes. And no. Which is where things get hella interesting. If you don't want to head down the rabbit hole, this is your last chance to get off the ride.
OUR BRAND IS CRISIS is, hmm, let's say 'adapted from' (I think the actual credit at the beginning of the film says 'suggested by', but to me that implies too much distance from the source material) a 2005 documentary of the same name, about the actual, real-life 2002 Bolivian elections and the impact of the American political consulting firm GCS on the outcome. In real life, the firm headed up by James Carville and Bob Shrum stepped in to aid the campaign of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a plutocratic former president who was very much in the hip pocket of the US government. His main opponent was Evo Morales, a populist, socialist candidate. Thanks to the strategies of GCS, de Lozada seemed headed to an easy victory until, a few days before the election, the US ambassador to Bolivia said something stupid in public and pushed away a lot of people already prone to distrust towards a US-backed candidate like de Lozada, and Morales almost pulled off an upset as a result. In the end, de Lozada lasted all of about 15 months in office before he was forced to resign and flee to America. Morales won the next election in 2005, and has been president ever since.
In Green's movie though, those details aren't just wrong, they seem deliberately perverted. Bodine is working for a consulting firm with US government ties, true, but it's her rival Candy who seems to be an explicitly Carville-like character. Rivera, the Morales stand-in, isn't presented as a committed crusader for change but a puppet whose populism is all on the surface. (The running gag of him having “great hair” is especially hilarious for anyone paying attention to the current Canadian election campaign.) Castillo, the de Lozada stand-in, isn't the front-runner, he's desperately trying to come from behind, putting him in a more sympathetic underdog position. The crisis-driven campaign narrative that boosts Castillo's campaign (and gives the film its title) is presented as being created out of whole cloth by Bodine, when in fact the Bolivian economy was really in some trouble heading into the 2002 election. And the late-game gaffe by the ambassador is instead presented as a scheme by Bodine, not to promote her own candidate, but to drive voters away from Rivera towards a third candidate the ambassador is saying nice things about and thus split the opposition. Naturally, the apparently gullible Bolivian electorate falls for it rather than turning on the candidate the US suddenly likes.
In fact the historical details are so distorted, you kind of have to wonder why. The easy answer is that it makes the real-life Morales look a bit suspicious, but painting it as some sort of CIA smear op doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. The film's ending, heck, Bodine's entire redemptive arc, hinges on the fact that the involvement of Americans in a foreign election is disastrously bad for Bolivia. Protests and riots against Castillo doesn't take months to develop, the way they did towards de Lozada, they start immediately when his first act after the election is to break his promise not to bring in the IMF without a referendum (the actual crisis in Bolivia involved the natural gas industry, but that's a switch that doesn't really impact the plot). The film essentially flips the white savior trope on its head, as some of the American “experts” seem to have no clue what they're doing, and in the end the only person that gets remotely saved is Jane herself. If the secret intent of OUR BRAND IS CRISIS is to send the message that the US needs to stop meddling in the politics of other countries, mission accomplished.
Of course, it's far more likely that the facts got twisted just to suit a more conventional Hollywood narrative structure, without regard for how it might look to someone who has a clue about the real-life election, but using Occam's Razor in the editing suite takes all the fun out of over-thinking things.
OUR BRAND IS CRISIS: good but not great Oscar bait, or subversive, barbed attack on 60 years of US foreign policy in the Western hemisphere? You be the judge.
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