"Recount" and unquenchable wrath

Some say it's a great flick.  Some say it sucks.  Here's some of what Gary Kamiya has to say about HBO's venture into the murk of the 2000 election.

For starters, it doesn't suck, says Kamiya.  It is, he says, a "first-rate docudrama."

... Close to eight years have passed since a divided Supreme Court ended the epic 36-day battle over the votes by halting the recount in Florida, thus handing the election to George W. Bush. The bitterness over that judicial outrage may have subsided, but it never died, and HBO's "Recount" brings it all back. In fact, it's almost more unbearable to revisit this black chapter in American history than it was to experience it at the time. Beyond the manifest injustice of the ruling, after eight years of George W. Bush, we now know exactly what that ruling resulted in. It is impossible to watch "Recount" without experiencing a constant stream of agonized what-ifs.

The actions of the US Supreme Court are the bottom line of the film and they seem even worse at eight years distance.

Gore formally contested the election, but a conservative judge ruled against him. Gore appealed the decision to the Florida Supreme Court. In a dramatic turnabout, the Democrat-dominated court not only ruled in his favor, but ordered that all ballots in the state that had recorded no vote for president (so-called undervotes) be manually recounted. Bush appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which by a 5-4 vote ordered that the manual recount stop immediately. Bush and Gore lawyers filed briefs with the high court, which heard their arguments the next day. Again by a 5-4 vote, with the five Republican justices concurring, the Supreme Court overturned the Florida court's decision, rejecting further manual recounts.

Kevin Spacey (who produced and acted in the film)  told Bob Edwards yesterday in an interview that the script was sent out to the principles for their comments and James Baker, who led the Bush team, approved it.  Kamiya writes:

That Baker -- the Bush family consigliere whose icy, authoritarian performances during the battle epitomized the GOP's win-at-all-costs approach -- liked the script, is both unsurprising and disconcerting. It's unsurprising because Baker himself comes off pretty well in the film. Played with uncanny verisimilitude by Tom Wilkinson, Baker is a coldblooded, highly effective strategist who rolls over his hopelessly wimpy, but principled, Democratic counterpart, Warren Christopher (played with ossified gravitas by John Hurt). Perhaps as a self-protective nod toward balance, the script goes out of its way to humanize Baker.  ... But it's also disconcerting that Baker liked the script, because "Recount" shows just what an outrageous, profoundly anti-democratic coup he helped pull off.

The Gore campaign wanted to behave decently and paid a heavy price for it.  Pressure was put on Gore from his own advisors -- Warren Christopher among them -- to give in like a gentleman.  Christopher comes off badly in the film.  Actually, Kamiya writes, "the fact that Gore's people are complaining, while Baker has given the film two thumbs up, is somewhat bizarre. The Gore team's effort may have been dithering, but it comes across as morally justified. This cannot be said of its counterpart."  We may take a more kindly view of  "dithering," though, now that we've seen what smash-and-grab did for democracy and America's reputation in the world.

Even critics who say they disliked the film and found it unfair agree that it's a cliffhanger.  It takes skill to write a cliffhanger about an event whose ending we know all too well -- the beginning of the worst presidency any of us has experienced. 

The truth is that the Republican maneuvering to stop the recounts, while reprehensible, was business as usual: This is what political operatives do. Elections are a game, and you try to win the game any way you can. The real outrage was the Supreme Court decision, one that radically departed from the conservative majority's judicial philosophy and disgraced its legacy. Justice is not a game, and judicial decisions that treat it as such, that are clearly results-driven, erode the legitimacy of American law and our civic culture.

"Recount," becomes a film about the corruption of the highest court in the land.  The filmmakers couldn't deal with SCOTUS at length in a script whose focus was a cliffhanger election, so let's look forward to a sequel with select members of "Sopranos" playing five Supreme Court justices.

A probing interview with James Baker would be interesting, too.  He's had plenty of time by now to see the outcome of his efforts to do a favor for George H. W. Bush.  Errol Morris could do him justice.

Comments

[Dan]

Hope you have a very nice holiday weekend PW!

[PW]

You too, Dan! How's the weather up there?