Where in the World is Sandra Bullock: Our Brand Is Crisis

Our Brand Is Crisis is like those lost presidential candidates who aren’t sure if they even want to be President, who soldier on as if by force, operating disinterested campaigns. Our Brand Is Crisis isn’t very sure of what it’s selling either. This film’s problem is every bit a structural one. Director David Gordon Green doesn’t know what this movie is, what it wants to be, or what it needs to be, to work. Green has a trump card—Sandra Bullock—but keeps her at bay as if afraid to overuse her star power. Considering how bland and forgettable this movie is, a little star power would have helped.  

Our Brand Is Crisis, which is based on the 2005 documentary of the same name, purports to show us the dastardly tactics of political strategists like James Carville, famous campaign manager for Bill Clinton. Carville is the closest thing to a pop political advisor, one who is almost as famous for his bald head, his Cajun accent (beautifully self-parodied in 30 Rock), his acerbic wit, and the fact that he’s a left-winger married to a right-winger, Mary Matalin. While James Carville is a fascinating character for a movie, this film is utterly un-fascinating. Carville—renamed Pat Candy for the film—is played by Billy Bob Thornton, who’s the perfect-looking choice. But Thornton is, like Sandra Bullock, kept in check by the director, so he doesn’t project the same brassy, larger-than-life image as the real Carville. Pat Candy is more of a comic foil for the main character, campaign strategist Jane Bodine, who’s played by Bullock.

Jane Bodine has acquired the nickname “Calamity Jane” during her long tenure as a campaign strategist. She’s propelled many politicians into a blaze of glory, and plunged just as many into the ground. Now, Bodine lives in voluntary exile in the mountains, trying to get over the last painful election, when she’s enlisted by the campaign managers of a Bolivian senator named Pedro Castillo. Castillo’s presidential run is barely viable: He was President years before and earned nothing but disdain from the Bolivian people; so Jane Bodine is tasked with transforming Castillo from a frog to a prince. Meanwhile, Jane’s arch nemesis Pat Candy happens to be working for Castillo’s opponent, the frontrunner. Candy and Bodine have a history fraught with dirty tricks, and the election becomes a stage to enact their personal vendettas against each other. (Of course, it’s not quite as serious as all that: there’s a semi-good-natured rivalry at the heart of their despicable mug-slinging tactics.)

The trouble is, Our Brand Is Crisis never rises above the level of a conventional political drama. David Gordon Green gets lost in developing a plot that doesn’t feel particularly urgent or interesting. That leaves us with the film’s perceptions about corruption in campaigns. But its perceptions are myopic and obvious: Crisis deals in generalities (the system as we know it is fundamentally broken and corrupt) and as such says nothing we don’t already know. And when he senses the movie has gotten away from him, Green throws in a few random scenes of comic lunacy to enliven things, unsuccessfully. Two examples: 1) When Bodine befriends some young Bolivian men and brings them back to her hotel room for a night of drunken reverie. After multiple rounds of drinks, they turn her bed sheet into a catapult, which they aim at Candy’s hotel room across the balcony. 2) When Castillo’s campaign bus tries to race the bus of the frontrunner, Rivera, and Bodine moons them. These scenes reek of desperation, and clash with the film’s naturally high-minded tone.  

When Sandra Bullock is allowed to command the screen and appear competent and in-control of herself, the movie improves; but Green keeps her on a tight leash. For the first twenty minutes after Jane arrives in Le Paz, she has intense nausea from the elevation, and so her character sits on a couch quietly while the others argue about how to resuscitate Castillo’s future. At times, Bullock is noticeably absent from a scene, or confined to the background until she suddenly and violently draws our attention to her, does something outlandish, and exits. During a campaign rally, a masked spectator smashes a raw egg on Castillo’s forehead, and Castillo decks him in front of the crowd and the news cameras. Green uses Sandra Bullock much like this egg-lobbing heckler. She is all shock value, and when the movie gets back to unraveling its plot, she returns to the foreground.

Why did David Gordon Green decide to keep his star at bay? The answer may be in Green’s intentions. It is conceivable that he wanted to make an insightful movie about the corruption of political campaigns, not just another Sandra Bullock vehicle. But without Sandra Bullock, the film is genuinely dull. None of the other characters develop into interesting people, except for Anthony Mackie, who transcends his role with his natural charm (he’s given no other tools to humanize his character). The characters in Crisis begin and end as the jaded, cynical worker bees of a miscarried political campaign.

Moreover, the film doesn’t make good on its attempts at criticizing the status quo. It waffles—like a politician finagling for votes—between high-minded drama and witty satire. Because none of the characters except Bodine has any life or humanity to them, it’s hard for us to care about the drama, and the film’s satire fizzles out from sheer laziness. We all know that politicians are liars, don’t we? Our Brand Is Crisis bandies that argument about as though it were a truly shocking exposé. As though that alone made for sharp satire.

On top of everything else, Green wants redemption for a world that is inherently unredeemable. In the end, Jane Bodine experiences a crisis of conscience that pushes her into a new career—the non-profit industry. I found it inspiring that Bodine had such a change of heart, but this did nothing for the movie, which emerges as a lackluster critique of politics in a world inundated with smart polemics about political corruption. I’m especially reminded of the 2009 film In the Loop and the HBO show Veep (both helmed by Armando Ianucci). In terms of incisive satire, Veep comes to the table brandishing a machete, where Our Brand Is Crisis is left wielding a butter knife. 

Written by Peter Straughan, who presumably shares some of the blame for the lackluster results. With Scott McNairy, Ann Dowd, Joaquim de Almeida, and Zoe Kazan.

Gravity

Gravity is a little, big outer-space movie with broad emotions and what may be strangely conflicting aspirations: it attempts to give us a tense, terrifying space movie without a big slimy alien or any other sensationalistic monster. It's just Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and outer space, with technology and the elements serving as the primary antagonists.

The opening scene of Gravity recreates the kind of enjoyably cornball banter (between the astronauts and 'Houston') you hear in those old space movies of the 1950s. That banter sets the tone for a movie that explores the traumatic jump from the (admittedly false) sense of security the astronauts feel to the utter helplessness they experience for the rest of the film. If nothing else, you can rest assured that at barely 90 minutes, Gravity is a mercifully short exercise in constant stress and anxiety.

Most of the time I was internally screaming at Sandra Bullock, who makes a desperate attempt to survive when she becomes detached from the security of the spacecraft during a routine repair mission. At the risk of spoiling a basic plot element, it's kind of like that movie Open Water, except in space. There's also a kind of Blair Witch Project element at work too: she's talking to herself much of the time, sometimes to a vague personage on the radio and sometimes not.

The movie has a big noble theme that it pounds away at, letting its Oscar aspirations show more than just a little: Sandra Bullock's character, who has endured a terrible personal tragedy back on earth, is faced with the choice of survival or surrender. She reckons with her own mortality and the value of truly living in spite of the risks involved. Then of course there's that scene where she barks like a dog, but I'll refrain from describing it in any more detail. I just hope that's the scene they play at Oscar time, if she's nominated.

One of the best things about Gravity is how the director--Alfonso Cuarón--builds a scene with deliberate pacing and allows something truly unsettling to develop. You don't generally see such movies anymore. (That same slow pacing is one of the things I like best about Alien.) The music (by Steven Price) casts a dreadful, ominous pall over the film, and the visuals overpower you as they're meant to do: you're lost in this vacuum with Sandra and George, wondering who is minding the store. It's the ultimate depiction of vulnerability.

Gravity is, in the end, about a kind of rebirth after being knocked down on a grand scale. It's the kind of obvious and easy lesson that most ambitious movies are reduced to in order to get a wide release from studios. Some will call this profound, and in a way, I suppose it is. Perhaps movies are trying to come out of their cynical phase, finally. Maybe I should be more receptive to this message. And yet, I can't help feeling that this is just Sandra Bullock's version of Robinson Crusoe (or Cast Away).

The admittedly spectacular visuals do give the film a sense of spellbinding grandeur (although seeing it in 3-D didn't seem that important to me), and Gravity is a successful movie in its own way. But it leaves you feeling excruciatingly tense. For me, it was often a matter of endurance rather than enjoyment. Clooney gives the film its only respite: his character is laid-back, philosophical in a very easy way, and clearly there to play off Bullock's tense, beaten-down tragic figure. The actors are both good. Written by the director and his son, Jonás Cuarón. ★★½

The Heat

I can't say that I loved The Heat as much as I loved Bridesmaids (both of which were helmed by director Paul Feig), but I howled my way through it just the same. How can you not, especially when Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy have such a wonderful onscreen chemistry? The Heat is nothing new, really: the old unlikely buddies plot with the one novelty being the gender of the buddies. As the by-the-book, cocky FBI agent, Bullock is despised by everyone in her department, but considers herself a success because she does her job better than anyone she knows. It's that old career-woman-with-a-chip-on-her-shoulder facade, one which Melissa McCarthy, as the brash, pushy, get-in-your-face-and-cuss-you-out Boston undercover cop, seeks to tear down with a wrecking ball.

The story involves a Boston drug dealer and hits close to home for McCarthy's character: her brother was working for this enigmatic dealer, and has just been released from prison. (She had him arrested herself, a point of betrayal in the eyes of her obnoxious, stereotypical Boston family, headed by SNL alum Jane Curtin, who's sadly given nothing memorable to do.) 

I don't suppose we go to comedies for novelty anymore. And if we do, we probably go to independent films like The Kings of Summer or something by Wes Anderson. Comedies became sitcom-level affairs probably in the 1960s, and with few exceptions, very little has changed about them. The old formulas continue to make money as long as the right faces are acting them out. As tried-and-true farces continue to be greenlit by the big studios, the only compensation for weary audience members is the acting. And we're lucky to live in a world, so green and young and still blinking with weariness under the new light of the morning sun, in which Melissa McCarthy is as celebrated as she is.

McCarthy's performances made Bridesmaids, a superior formula comedy, and Identity Thief, an inferior one, not just watchable but lovable, at least partly. And she offers the same saving grace to The Heat, but she's matched by Sandra Bullock, who's at her best when she's being a clown. (Who remembers that she was in a drama like Crash, or the ridiculous thriller The Net, when she's given us much better times in movies like The Proposal, not a great movie, and now The Heat, a pretty good movie?)

A caveat on excessive profanity: As a teenager, I developed a fondness for bad language, perhaps because it was verboten. Somehow, a four-letter word can magnify the comic force of a line exponentially, if done right. But, it needs to be done with creativity and enough actual ideas to justify itself. Melissa McCarthy peppers her dialogue with F words, and while some of them work, the total effect is a kind of numbing of the senses. You get the idea that she thinks this is the only way to be funny. (And yet, she managed a very funny character in Bridesmaids without using the F word every three seconds.) Meanwhile, it was delightfully amusing that Bullock's character refused to cuss, and when she finally did (during her predictable change-of-heart, in which she realizes how stuffy she is and how "good" her partner is at her job), it was quite amusing. (And I thought back to The King's Speech, when Colin Firth erupts into a torrent of profanity during a particularly frustrating session with his speech therapist.)

The Heat will probably catch some flack with critics because it is absolutely unbelievable. These ladies would never get as far as they do in reality, without either getting themselves killed or dismissed from duty. But, who goes to these kinds of movies for realism anyway? It is an uproarious if imperfect diversion. Written by Katie Dippold. With Demian Bichir, Marlon Wayans, Michael Rapaport, Spoken Reasons, Dan Bakkedahl, and Taran Killam. ★★★

Infamous

Infamous (2006) is the story of Truman Capote's experiences researching and writing In Cold Blood (1966), a novelistic account of the brutal murder of the Clutter Family in Kansas in 1959. As Capote, Toby Jones gets pretty close to a perfect imitation of that unforgettably sissified voice of Capote's. He exudes the enigmatic mixture of gaudy, flamboyant, brashness and furtive shame and vulnerability that characterizes our perception of Capote. The movie portrays essentially two Capotes: the one who held the attention of any social gathering with his gossip about celebrities, and the one who poured himself into his work, a book which made him and destroyed him simultaneously.

As Harper Lee (called Nelle by friends), Sandra Bullock is good. (Most people probably know that Harper Lee and Truman Capote were childhood friends, and that Lee based the character of Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird on Capote.) The trouble with Sandra Bullock is that she's a big star, which is okay if all you want from her is Miss Congeniality, but her persona, the fact that she's so well-known, gets in the way of of her more serious performances. There's a sort of barrier between the audience and her. She managed to break the barrier with a blonde wig and a Southern accent in The Blind Side, and in Infamous she just about decimates it with a subtler Southern woman performance. She's humble and plain in Infamous; she's centered and quiet and careful when it comes to what she says and how she says it: the polar opposite of Capote, who possesses a keen ability to turn a phrase or sling a sarcastic retort; his advantage is being able to win people over with his cleverness. Hers is her lack of pretension.

One of the most interesting things about Infamous isn't its exploration of a possible attraction between Capote and one of the killers, Perry Smith (portrayed by Daniel Craig, who didn't seem to me to look right for the part, but who turned in a convincing performance nonetheless). Rather, what's fascinating is the understated way the movie glimpses into Harper Lee's career. She never wrote another novel after To Kill A Mockingbird, although she did start one, eventually putting it away out of frustration. Her success, I think, eclipsed Capote's in the long run (probably because her novel was far less morally ambiguous), even though he had a more prolific career than her. And we get a sense of the things Harper Lee might have been thinking about such sudden and dramatic success upon a first novel, and about the subject of a writing career in general. In fact, those moments in which Infamous examines the whole world of writing are when it shines the brightest. It's got some maudlin, made-for-TV sentiments that it pulls off with measured success, but those moments are cheap compared to its portrayal of the loneliness of writing. It's a striking movie, one that captures the precariousness of human security, the prisons people put themselves in, and the shams people enact to avoid whatever is painful in their lives.

Capote's New York entourage includes Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Bogdanovich, Michael Panes (as Gore Vidal), and John Benjamin Hickey. The other killer, Dick Hickock, is played by Lee Pace, and Jeff Daniels plays the the lead investigator in the small Kansas town where the murders occurred. There's also a stunning opener with Jones and Weaver at a night club where Gwyneth Paltrow performs a snazzy love song with a backdrop of stars that feels positively dreamy, in a manufactured sort of way, the way those old romantic comedies from the 1950s feel. It doesn't exactly fit with the rest of the movie, which alternates between drab and dusty Kansas and the swinging Manhattan social world, but tips in favor of gloominess rather than glamour.

Directed by Douglas McGrath.

The Blind Side

Football movies. They have emerged as a genre within themselves. As a non-sports fan, I tend not to express much interest in them, even though I have enjoyed the few I've seen (Remember the Titans and We Are Marshal come to mind). The Blind Side works because it's not the same old story about a team coming together and winning, but a close-up into the story of one individual, a shy, overlooked youth nicknamed Big Mike who is slipping through the cracks in every way imaginable until he finds an unexpected friend in Sandra Bullock, a wealthy, tough and funny Southern woman with a husband (who owns 85 Taco Bells) and two kids. Bullock has never been better, and director John Lee Hancock generally avoids indulging in too much sentiment, preferring to keep things a little more stable and realistic. The film is emotionally charged enough without sacrificing restraint. I was also impressed by Quentin Aaron's performance as "Big Mike" (Michael Oher, a real-life football player, as it turns out), whose performance relies much more on the subtleties of facial expressions and movement than on dialogue as he struggles to come out of his shell. Tim McGraw plays Bullock's husband, and Jae Head steals the show as their rambunctious and intelligent son. Very funny and poignant. ★★★

The Proposal

I like Ryan Reynolds. Most of the comedy actors of today don't strike me as very funny. Or when they do, it's not very well-crafted humor. Ryan Reynolds has a knack for making a line of dialogue all his own with the tone of his voice or his facial expressions. The only flaw about his acting is that most of the time his character has some degree of prickishness about him. That is minimized in The Proposal, where Reynolds plays the personal assistant to very, very important senior editor Sandra Bullock. Sandra has made a career out of being likable, so it's fun to see her play a self-obsessed diva for a while. We already know she will become softened. We also know that Ryan and Sandra will inevitably fall in love in spite of their parasitic, I-hate-you-but-I-need-you relationship.

And so Sandra gets to play While You Were Sleeping all over again, but from a different angle. She's the single girl who masquerades as Ryan's fiance to avoid being deported to Canada, falling in love with not only Reynolds but his parents (Craig T. Nelson and Mary Steenbergen) and his sharp grandma (the ever-delightful Betty White). So, while The Proposal doesn't really veer from the formula much, it sure shows us a good time. ★★½