"Our Brand Is Crisis": Selling democracy overseas, whether the customers want it or not
"I'm not interested in making a movie about a bunch of creeps," says Rachel Boynton, director of the fascinating documentary "Our Brand Is Crisis," which follows a group of high-powered American political consultants working on the 2002 presidential election in Bolivia. "That's easy to do, right? I'm interested in complicated things, in shades of gray."
Indeed, what makes Boynton's film stand out amid the current crop of political documentaries is its rigorous reportorial fairness, and its refusal to simplify material in order to score facile ideological points. It might have been easy, from a left-wing perspective, to demonize the consultants from Greenberg Carville Shrum -- the now-defunct Washington firm headed by former Clinton aides Stan Greenberg and James Carville -- as they stage-managed the campaign of American-style liberal reformer Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada for the Bolivian presidency.
That would have been both unfair and, as Boynton observes, uninteresting. Her two principal protagonists are GCS pollster and analyst Jeremy Rosner (who was key man on the campaign) and Sánchez himself, a millionaire mine-owner and former president known to Bolivians as Goni. One can disagree with these men's visions of Bolivia's future, or their political methods, but there can be no question that they sincerely want to rescue this poor and isolated country from its economic crisis. "It's really important in the beginning of the movie to establish that these guys really believe in what they're doing," Boynton says. "That's a fundamental part of the story."
For someone who works in the shadowy business of shaping public opinion, in fact, Rosner comes off as achingly sincere. He's a trim, enthusiastic and strikingly intelligent man, distressingly eager to pour out his innermost thoughts for Boynton's camera. When she asks him, early in the film, whether he sees GCS's work in Bolivia as an expression of American idealism, he mulls the question seriously. He hopes that's true, he says. Of course GCS is working for profit, it's not a charity. But its principals (all mainstream or liberal Democrats) also believe in helping the democratic process take root around the world. "We do this because we believe in a particular brand of democracy," he says, "market-based and modern, but with broad benefits. That's why we were working for Goni, that's why we were in Bolivia."
It's the key moment in "Our Brand Is Crisis" (a phrase actually uttered in the film by advertising consultant Tad Devine). GCS plotted every move by Goni during the campaign -- every heartwarming TV spot, every attack ad, every debate strategy, every photo op -- based on the conviction that he best represented the "particular brand of democracy" it was selling, and that that brand was best for Bolivia (and pretty much everywhere else).
Many Bolivians were not convinced. During Goni's previous term as president during the '90s, he was seen (whether fairly or not) as having sold off the country's assets to foreign companies and as having promised a lot of social benefits that were never delivered. It doesn't help that he's rich in a poor country, white in a nation that is mostly mestizos and indigenous people, or that he's lived so much of his life in the United States he speaks Spanish with a pronounced Yankee accent. Rosner tells him at one point that for about 55 percent of the electorate, the only question about Goni is "how high the gallows should be."
Yet Goni, as Boynton says, remained confident that he had prescribed the right medicine for Bolivia and could do so again. Her film was only possible, she says, because of "the conflict between Goni's perception that he had done the right thing and Bolivia's perception that he had sold out the country. That's why he let me film. He was convinced that he was the right guy for the country. And the consultants believed that he was the right guy for the country. If they were working for a guy they didn't believe in, they would never have let me film."
What follows is on one level an exciting insider-baseball political drama: Can Rosner and the other undeniably ingenious consultants massage this seemingly unpalatable candidate into something a bare plurality of Bolivians will accept? (Goni doesn't need a majority to be elected; it's a three-way election, with other major candidates running to his right and his left.) Do focus groups, attack ads and tracking polls work as well in a nation of impoverished campesinos as in a nation of comfortable suburbanites? And if they get this guy elected, will his patented privatization-and-globalization remedy work any better for poor Bolivians than it did the last time?
Those of you who follow global news will already know the answers to some of those questions, but Boynton wants as many people as possible to see the film without knowing much about the outcome. "I hope the film works as an exciting story," says the petite, loquacious director, who looks younger than her 32 years (another factor that may have worked in her favor). "I hope it has you on the edge of your seat: 'What's going to happen?' 'Can they pull this off?' At the same time, I hope it raises a lot of questions about our role in the world right now. Questions about our relationship to everywhere else, not just Bolivia, about what we bring when we go overseas, and what kind of assumptions we walk in the door with.
"I really think the Americans in the film, whether you like them or not, are emblematic of us as a nation," she goes on. "We go around the world and we've got this idea that we know what's going to work. I don't want people to mistake this for a movie about Bolivia. It's about the world and it's about America. When we talk about spreading democracy around the world -- is that really what we're trying to do? At some idealistic level, maybe yeah. But there are a lot of other things we're trying to spread too."
"Our Brand Is Crisis" opens March 1 at Film Forum in New York, with other cities to follow in late March.
"Sorry, Haters": The Manhattan yuppie woman, the Arab cab driver, his sister-in-law and a bomb
Jeff Stanzler's low-budget drama "Sorry, Haters" is a well-acted little thriller of the sort sometimes called a "twisty" -- I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it'll keep you guessing about its characters and it has an intriguing mean streak. Despite the overlay of post-9/11 politics and social satire, "Sorry, Haters" is basically a B-movie packaged for an art-house audience -- but if that's a burgeoning micro-trend, I approve of it too. (Outside of direct-to-video and made-for-cable, the B-movie has pretty much died out in Hollywood of late.)
Stanzler takes a stressed-out New York professional woman (Robin Wright Penn) and puts her, late one night, in the cab driven by Ashade (Abdellatif Kechiche), a devout Muslim and Syrian immigrant. Over the course of a mysterious personal errand to the New Jersey suburbs and their return, the two people's stories come out, or seem to. The woman is Phyllis, a programming exec at an MTV-like network who's in charge of a series called "Sorry, Haters," in which celebs display their gratuitous wealth to the masses. Ashade is a Ph.D. chemist who is taking care of his French sister-in-law (Élodie Bouchez) and her baby; his brother was recently seized at the airport and disappeared to Guantánamo. Phyllis has clout and thinks she can help; Ashade is of course grateful for this Samaritan's intervention.
As I say, these are the two people's stories; the reality, in each case, may be a bit more complicated. If you pay attention, you'll figure out pretty fast which one of them is the most outrageous liar, but Stanzler's script has laid many traps for both people and for us. Penn, a fine actress always overshadowed by her husband, is particularly good as a single career woman beset by voracious bitterness toward herself and the world. Kechiche, a Tunisian-born actor and director with an elegant bearing, has a more straightforward role, but as his relationship with Phyllis ravels and unravels, Ashade also displays some darker patches.
Even in this plot summary, I've already deliberately misled you; it's just that kind of movie. There's an utterly implausible terrorism subplot, along with a funny supporting role by Sandra Oh as a co-worker at the Q-Dog network, and some entertaining snippets of "Sorry, Haters," Phyllis' purported show. But basically the movie rises or falls with Penn and Kechiche, as two lonely people drawn to each other in the American night, with knives drawn. In their best moments, they find an emotional truth in Stanzler's script that transcends its increasingly grotesque story and alleged political significance. And, of course, there's a sting in the tail you may be expecting but still won't quite predict.
"Sorry, Haters" opens March 1 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities. It will also be made available via IFC's Video on Demand pay-cable service, although details have not been announced.
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Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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