Movie To Check Out: Recount

This past weekend should have been great. On Saturday evening, I went to see Mission Of Burma at the Black Cat, playing songs mainly from their new album The Sound the Speed the Light. It was a good show, and I was honored to stand right in front of Roger Miller's amp (directed toward the audience, I imagine, to offset any problems with tinnitus--I also noticed that only half of Peter Prescott's drum setup, the part that faced Miller specifically, was cordoned off, meaning that I couldn't hear the drums nearly as well as the guitar). I also managed to gank a set list, and the band came back for two encores, delighting me to no end when the band ignored a dude's shrill, insistent cry for "Mica" and instead played Peter Prescott's first tune, the awesome "Learn How" from Vs.

The next day, I woke up exhibiting all the hallmarks of an extreme yet temporary fever--I was cold, yet running a temperature, plus there were aching joints in my feet that I felt probably came from standing all that time at the concert and then walking home in the extreme cold.

In any case, I was incapacitated, barely able to leave my room, and I have to thank my housemate Patrick for finally coming to my aid and making me a smoothie, without which I would have gone maybe 36 hours without sustenance.

The next day, most of the joint pain and fever had gone away, but I still had a rather insistent headache. I did manage to make it to my library, and I checked out the movie Recount, which I enjoyed a lot.

Recount is an HBO made-for-TV movie that revolves around the power players in Florida during the 2000 election. It mainly covers the 36-day period between the Nov. 7 election and the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court ruling on Dec. 12 that led to Gore's concession. Bush and Gore are barely factors in the movie itself, a wise decision by the filmmakers given that the market was already cornered on impersonations of the two.

What Recount has that a lot of movies don't have, particular ones that aim to summarize history as recent as this, is an almost crippling fidelity to the facts of the case. There is a lot to admire in making a movie that hews so closely to the established history, but that doesn't necessarily mean the drama is there. A lot of credit goes to the writer Danny Strong and director Jay Roach (as well as Sydney Pollack, who was originally set to direct the movie before he became ill and eventually died) for emphasizing those certain scenes that provide the needed dramatic contrast. Situations like the one in which a Gore aide with bad ankles is forced to catch up to the vice-president before he mistakenly concedes on election day, or the scene in which an army of young Republicans attempt to invade and shut down the efforts of Palm Beach vote counters, have a sense of flow and immediacy that would work in any thriller rooted entirely in fiction.

And there are plenty of moments in the film that are basically anti-dramatic, as well. One of my favorites is when the Democratic pollster Michael Whouley (Denis Leary) describes just how ass-backwards the Florida voting process is, and how in particular it doesn't tend to favor Democrats. The phenomenon of the "dimpled chad" (apparently it's never pluralized?), for instance, is basically exclusive to poor communities in Florida that would vote Democratic. It seems like a system set up to fail, and basically everyone in the movie admits that running the ballots through gets a slightly different total every time. And, as the movie seems to suggest, the more carefully those ballots were considered, the more likely it looked that Al Gore was actually the winner, which put the Republicans in the place of having to find a legal and justifiable way of shutting it down.

Luckily they were in Florida, where the power was on their side. In researching this movie, Danny Strong interviewed about 40 people involved, and he made sure that every single scene in the movie had been corroborated by at least one eyewitness, except in one case: Katherine Harris refused to be part of this movie, so a brief moment where she is shown by herself constitutes the biggest bit of artistic license in the movie. It's not a coincidence that Katherine Harris ends up looking worse than anyone else by film's end. She is obviously shown to be involved with some of the shadier facts of the case (such as original voter suppression efforts that singled out minority voters whose names were similar to convicted felons), and nearly everyone on both sides agrees that she was in a compromised position that she chose to handle quite badly.

The fact that this movie basically recounts the story word-for-word makes some of the goings-on that much more astonishing. We have the Supreme Court to thank for shutting down the recount effort when Gore was about 500 votes away from victory. The film is brilliant at exploring the absurd minutia used by the Supreme Court for justifying what was clearly a victory handed to their favored candidate. When the main character of the movie, Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), reads the SCOTUS' verdict at the end of the movie, he notes a part of the fine print that would in a decent world scare all of those afraid of "judicial activism": "The court has ruled that this decision is 'limited to the present circumstances." So basically, they're making sure it will never again be used as a precedent, probably because they know how shoddy of an interpretation of Florida law it is (and how it flies in the face of more well-established election laws, such as the ones signed into being by Governor George W. Bush in Texas).

I highly recommend this movie for the same reason that I would recommend In the Loop: it doesn't dumb down a situation more prone than many to political interpretation, and yet it somehow manages to keep a handle on what's important, and in the end, we manage feel for characters on both sides of the debate.

(Except for Katherine Harris, but we can be happy knowing that she would eventually be getting what she deserved.)