The real story of “Our Brand Is Crisis” is how we screwed up Bolivia: Behind the bland Sandra Bulloc
Wednesday, Oct 28, 2015 05:58 PM CDT
The real story of “Our Brand Is Crisis” is how we screwed up Bolivia: Behind the bland Sandra Bullock movie lies another strange-but-true tale of botched American meddling
A muddled Hollywood fable of dirty tricks and spiritual redemption conceals a fascinating lesson in democracy
Andrew O'Hehir
In case the true story behind the baffling and approximately well-intentioned Sandra Bullock star vehicle “Our Brand Is Crisis” makes any difference, here it is: Way back in the innocent days of 2002 (I’m kidding about “innocent”), the high-powered political consulting firm Greenberg Carville Shrum parachuted into Bolivia to take up the cause of a struggling presidential candidate named Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, universally known as “Goni.” Rachel Boynton, a documentary director whose work focuses on ideology, politics and power (her most recent movie, “Big Men,” is about the global workings of the oil industry), came along and made an extraordinary film about that campaign, whose title was drawn from a telling phrase coined by one of the GCS consultants.
That is now the title of the Bullock movie directed by indie-film veteran David Gordon Green and written by Peter Straughan (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), which is also set during a Bolivian presidential campaign and stars Billy Bob Thornton, Anthony Mackie, Scoot McNairy, Ann Dowd and Zoe Kazan as Bullock’s rivals or colleagues in the Machiavellian business of reinventing candidates and reshaping public opinion. What makes this fictionalized “Our Brand Is Crisis” worth noticing – to the extent it is, which isn’t much – is that the filmmakers probably believe they are delivering roughly the same message as Boynton’s documentary did, but in fact the most important aspects of this striking story has been scrubbed away or laundered into Hollywood-style pseudo-psychological neutrality.
This movie offers us the tale of the fall and redemption of an unscrupulous white lady — who we know cannot really be unscrupulous since she’s Sandra Bullock. Although I hasten to add that even by the standards of Bullock’s implacable, steel-jawed underacting this is a dull performance. Around the edges of this story about Bullock’s character, an especially ruthless consultant known as Calamity Jane, there are a few intriguing hints of other stories about the international financial system, the power of fear in politics and the American understanding of what democracy means when applied to other people in other countries. “Our Brand Is Crisis” is being released by Warner Bros., but was largely funded by Participant Media, which produces what it calls “socially relevant films and documentaries.” In other words, in this case the right-wingers are correct: “Liberal Hollywood” is in full effect.
Yet you really have to read between the lines and dig into the subtext of Straughan’s screenplay to perceive the issues that drove Boynton’s film. What the hell was James Carville and Stan Greenberg’s consulting firm – with its close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership class – doing in one of South America’s smallest and poorest nations? Who was really paying for their work with Goni, an unpopular former president who had spent much of his life in the United States and spoke Spanish so poorly that Bolivian opponents derided him as “El Gringo”?
More:
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/the_real_story_of_our_brand_is_crisis_is_how_we_screwed_up_bolivia_behind_the_bland_sandra_bullock_movie_lies_another_strange_but_true_tale_of_botched_american_meddling/
Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016135490
