Review of Recount

Review: Recount

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending an advanced screening of HBO's new film, Recount. It retells the true, and mind-boggling, story of the 2000 Presidential Election confusion at Florida. This material, as one would presume, is tough for all of its audience to appreciate. The director, Jay Roach, tries his best to tell the story as fairly as possible, but due to his previous films (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) he creates caricatures of most characters. This is best exemplified by Laura Dern's character, Katherine Harris. While Harris was known at the time for lacking knowledge and experience in politics, the film might have gone a little too far in prominently displaying her unintelligent decision-making. Kevin Spacey does a great job as the main character, Ron Klain, Al Gore's chief-of-staff. Tom Wilkinson also is superb as James Baker, Bush's right-hand man. Baker, however, is clearly portrayed as the "bad guy," which I feel was a bit unfair. This is backed-up by the fact that James Baker said himself, "I don't think I am as ruthless as the movie portrays me, or that Warren Christopher is as wimpish as he is portrayed to be." He does find the movie to be entertaining, as I did, despite its minor flaws. It has good acting, good direction, and most of all, it succeeds in doing a fine job of explaining what truly went on without dumbing it down. And I feel it must be appreciated that, as Jeffrey Wells says from The Huffington Post, "...it's no small feat to make a gripping film that's mostly about a bunch of middle-aged political operatives bickering and maneuvering over vote counts..." Although, don't be surprised by the commotion it will make when it premieres May 25th on HBO.

Posted on 05/15/08 by: AlgaeFungi 04:19 PM