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There's a fascinating horse race going on in the political-campaign dramedy "Our Brand Is Crisis," and it doesn't involve the candidates running for office.
No, the race that defines this strange and intermittently engaging movie is a battle of what's more cynical: the tactics of American political operatives gone global or the rewriting of a once-true story to maintain star Sandra Bullock's reputation as America's sweetheart.
Bullock plays Jane Bodine, a retired campaign strategist lured back into the game by political experts Nell (Ann Dowd) and Ben (Anthony Mackie), who are working on an election in Bolivia. They are working for Sen. Castillo (Joaquin de Almeida), a center-right former president who's trailing the populist liberal front-runner in the polls by 28 points. Jane takes the job when she learns the liberal's chief strategist is her archnemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), who has beaten her the last few times their candidates faced each other.
Jane, once she acclimates to the Bolivian altitude, lays out Castillo's new strategy: The country is in crisis, and only an old hand like Castillo can keep Bolivia from falling into chaos. It's a choice between hope and fear, and Jane knows that her man will only win if the voters are fearful.
The movie is a fictionalized gloss on a 2005 documentary, also titled "Our Brand Is Crisis." In that film, Rachel Boynton followed a group of American political consultants — including the viperous James Carville — as they exported the worst of U.S. politics to the 2002 election in Bolivia.
In the remake, director David Gordon Green ("Pineapple Express") and screenwriter Peter Straughan ("Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") play with some of the main figures, but the central idea is still there. Jane employs every barely ethical dirty trick, including feeding false information to Candy and bringing in a pit bull of a researcher (Zoe Kazan) to dig up dirt on the candidates — including her own.
There's a certain smugness to the presentation, though. Straughan has his characters repeat many political anecdotes — legends about Lyndon Johnson's dirty tricks or Adlai Stevenson's disparagement of common voters — that anyone in the business would already know by heart. Green gets good laughs from the gamesmanship between the operatives, but in his efforts to show the election's meaning to average Bolivians, he's on shakier ground. For a filmmaker who cut his teeth on slice-of-life indies like "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls," that's an unfortunate lapse in empathy.
But where "Our Brand Is Crisis" ultimately falls apart is in the finale, in which Bullock gets to pin some late-arriving humanity on her character's tattered morality. Jane comments early on that "you don't change the man to fit the narrative, you change the narrative to fit the man" — and the movie's phony ending shows the same is true for a woman, if that woman is a bankable Hollywood star like Sandra Bullock.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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'Our Brand Is Crisis'
U.S. political operatives export their tactics to Bolivia in a comedy-drama that's as cynical as its characters.
Where • Theaters everywhere.
When • Opens Friday, Oct. 30.
Rating • R for language including some sexual references.
Running time • 107 minutes.