But who's counting
Eight years later, HBO re-creates the fiasco in Florida and the fight that installed a president
This is absolutely the perfect moment to revisit the 2000 election. With the new movie "Recount," HBO is either remarkably savvy or the beneficiary of happy coincidence. For one thing, the two-term presidency of George W. Bush, now deflating in a national sigh of disappointment, provides the movie with a stark living epilogue. That big mess of legal wrangling and hanging chad in Florida in 2000? It has all come down to 2008 and a White House drowning in public disapproval ratings.
"Recount," which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m., is also precisely timed to remind us of the potency and imperfections of the Electoral College, as we amble into the 2008 presidential election, parsing superdelegates like Fagin lording over his filthy lucre. Does every American vote count? Or is the game so much more convoluted, so much more of a contest of wills and backroom legal tactics? "Recount" is the cautionary tale of how an election can go horribly awry, just as we gear up the system again to vote in a new president.
Timeliness, though, does not equal drama or comedy, and "Recount" is a surprisingly enervated and enervating piece of work. Written by Danny Strong and directed by Jay Roach of the "Austin Powers" movies, it just doesn't manage to make a compelling narrative out of the 2000 fiasco that wound up in the Supreme Court. Given the rich material, including a concession, a retraction of that concession, and then, again, a concession, "Recount" should be tight and tense, or, perhaps, wildly satirical. Instead, it just rehashes the mess all over again, in detail, with lots of news footage to support the dutifully invented backstage scenes.
Along the way to the inevitable Republican victory, there is sound (Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, Al Gore's cynical former chief of staff) and there is fury (Denis Leary as Gore's field director Michael Whouley, seen throwing a chair against a wall and heard brandishing his local accent). There is even a smidgen of camp, with the always welcome Laura Dern on hand as a mad-lady Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, preening and milking her media moment like a Southern Norma Desmond. Indeed, the "Recount" actors all seem up for a good time, in particular Tom Wilkinson as former Secretary of State James Baker. "This is a street fight for the presidency of the United States," he announces to his team of Bushies, so elegant and courtly and yet so stubbornly scrappy.
But the eager ensemble isn't carefully and strategically deployed by Strong's script or Roach's direction. On "The West Wing," the writers and directors were generally able to freight all the technical knots and procedural one-upmanship with emotion. They turned governmental and legal arm-wrestling into a kind of sporting event for us. Strong, mostly known for his acting work on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Gilmore Girls," seems to have researched the month-plus period after the 2000 election so thoroughly that he wound up getting mired in the facts. If he'd taken a step back, been more selective about which details to include, he might have been able to gracefully shape a more specific and engaging story line within the limits of historical accuracy.
Strong and Roach do take a point of view here and there, giving us a frustratingly passive Warren Christopher (John Hurt) as the embodiment of the Democrats' unwillingness to engage in Baker's "street fight." And they give us glimpses of black comedy, including Gore's famous "You don't have to get snippy about it" comment to Bush when he calls to retract his concession. "I feel like I'm stuck in the night of the living bubbes," Spacey's Klain jokes about the elderly Floridians who fear they misvoted on their ballots, as he gradually picks up the legal fight from which Christopher recedes.
But overall, the "Recount" canvas is too broad and too populated to fully engage. The movie doesn't embrace its potential for farce, for suspense, or for outrage. Ultimately, the filmmakers could have punched a little harder.
