Swing Vote (2008)

Director: Joshua Michael Stern

Cast: Kevin Costner as Bud Johnson, Madeline Carroll as Molly Johnson, Paula Patton as Kate Madison, Kelsey Grammer as President Andrew Boone, Dennis Hopper as Donald Greenleaf, Nathan Lane as Art Crumb, Stanley Tucci as Martin Fox, George Lopez as John Sweeney, Judge Reinhold as Walter, Charles Esten as Lewis, Richard Petty as Himself, Willie Nelson as Himself, Mare Winningham as Larissa Johnson, Mark Moses as Attorney General Wyatt, Nana Visitor as Galena Greenleaf

I'm going to go ahead and assume that it's not an easy task to make a
crowd-pleasing movie centered on politics that goes to such strenuous
efforts to be non-partisan and maybe chalk up my dissatisfaction with
the movie to that. Then again, it might also have something to do with
a critical decision that they made in how to end the movie, which is
sure to make every single solitary person who watches it throw up their
arms in disgust.

But the movie is not about who wins the presidency, it's about the pure
chaos of the American political system and its millions of weaknesses
and faults. Sure, the premise of a presidential election coming down to
a single vote is as preposterous as they come, but man if this movie
doesn't get you thinking critically about the electoral process then
it's safe to assume that probably nothing ever will.

Kevin Costner plays Bud, an American nobody from New Mexico who has
never done anything with his life except have a daughter with a
delusional drug addict who thinks she has a big singing career in her
near future. He works as an egg inspector at an egg packaging plant,
and he and his co-workers mourn the loss of their friends' (and soon,
their own) jobs to "insourcing," the process of bringing Mexicans in to
take their jobs rather than ship the factory and all those egg-laying
chickens to Mexico.

Bud staggers through life in a drunken daze most of the time, routinely
letting down his daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll), who raises him like
a child. She gets him out of bed in the morning, criticizes his
laziness and irresponsibility, reminds him to vote because it's part of
a school project that she has to do, and through sighs of exasperation
attempts to keep him at least a little bit in line. And of course it's
the only thing in life that she fails at. When Bud gets drunk rather
than show up to vote, she manages to almost cast his vote herself due
to the sleepy voting booth security of beautiful Texico, New Mexico,
which Google Earth has just informed me is a real place. Population
1,065.

In a clever plot development, it turns out that Bud's vote didn't go
completely through but it appeared that he was there, so he is given
another opportunity to cast his vote. Not right away, mind you, even
though he evidently already tried to vote and thus probably had his
mind made up. No, he is given ten days before he has to vote, thus
providing plenty of time for a movie to happen.

Young Madeline Carroll steals most of the scenes that she's in as Bud's
daughter, so it's interesting that her character is one of the biggest
weak points in the movie, the other one being her dad. Bud is supposed
to be a typical American, but I just saw a drifting drunk who never did
anything with his life and never would have had he not been forced to.
It's true that the vast majority of Americans live lives that are
closer to Bud's than President Boone's (Kelsey Grammar), but does he
have to be a TOTAL loser? How about just making him be a likable,
regular guy? Like the guy he played in Field of Dreams? When I imagine
the average American, I imagine something like Ray Kinsella. Although
maybe with a slightly smaller house and less whispering from the sky.

The other problem is that the screenwriters overshot the character of
Molly by about 160 IQ points. So much for the average American, right?
This girl writes a school essay that doesn't merit a special award from
the principal to show her dad, it grants her NATIONAL TELEVISED
RECOGNITION. But to be honest, I had more of a problem with the fact
that not only does she wake her deadbeat dad up in the morning so he
could take her to school, she also treks to the bar and, finding him
passed out in his truck when he should have been voting, she pushes him
over and then drives him home herself. She's about 11 years old.

But where the movie succeeds is as a scathing revelation about certain
realities of the American electoral process, such as the electoral
college, which simplifies the vote-counting process even while
massively distorting the actual numbers of who voted for who. The whole
movie is about how one man's vote really does matter, but it leaves you
with the feeling that you are supposed to forget that once he votes,
every single vote in his state for the other candidate WON'T matter
anymore, because they'll be switched to the other candidate. Isn't it
interesting how that works? Can't we just count every single vote and
award each candidate one huge number of individual votes? Seems a
little more accurate to me.

Anyway, I do appreciate the way the movie highlights the fact that both
sides, Republican and Democrat, are equally willing to stoop to any
level and do absolutely whatever it takes to win, and that no one is
above hitting below the belt and making hugely unethical decisions.
There is a lot that needs to be changed in American politics, and even
while clearly being based on the Election of 2000, one of the most
controversial in American history, it calls those things to attention
without ever even hinting that either side is right or wrong. The movie
insists that America is the greatest country in the world but that in
some ways, we're doing it all wrong, but the fact that a movie like
this has the freedom to get made proves that even though we haven't
reached a level of pure cohesive harmony, underneath all of our
imperfections is a clear desire to get there.