This is a disappointing fictional version of Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary Our Brand Is Crisis, about US political consultant James Carville, the Democrat spin-doctor who famously married his Republican opponent Mary Matalin after the 1992 US presidential campaigns. It’s a laboured and unoriginal satire, directed by David Gordon Green, which finds a cynical theme-variation in this unlikeliest of Romeo and Juliet unions, and makes a meal of Carville’s real-life adventure in 2002, when he masterminded a Bolivian presidential campaign.
Sandra Bullock plays Jane, a genius in the black arts of political PR who has alcohol and depression issues but is brought out of retirement by a lucrative offer to work for Bolivia’s reactionary presidential challenger. Promoting the politics of fear, she convinces Bolivians they are “in crisis”. Working for the opposition out in La Paz is her PR rival and former lover Pat Candy: Billy Bob Thornton on deadpan form. So it’s personal.
Like Wag the Dog, the film assumes there is a huge amount of mileage in the contrast between wised-up US sophisticates and the primitive innocence of a remote foreign country. There’s nothing new about the political smoke-and-mirrors; the Bullock/Thornton relationship fails to convince, and the inevitable idealistic resolution feels unsatisfying and unearned.
