Review of Swing Vote (2008) by Markb. — 13 Aug 2008

Making imitation Alfred Hitchcock movies isn't all that hard to do (and many of us who have watched Brian DePalma's career over the last decade wish to God he'd go back to doing them), but making imitation Frank Capra movies.

..well, that's tough. Those who try to do so often forget that the final quarter of It's A Wonderful Life is really one of the darkest movies ever made (the better, more powerful and more radiant when Capra finally turns on the light), and so for every effort that works (like last year's lovely, fanciful The Astronaut Farmer from the Polish brothers, or the 1980 John Ritter gem Hero At Large, a charming unofficial redo of Meet John Doe) you get ten or so like 2001's The Majestic, which triple Capra's speechifying and sugar content while slowing his unerring sense of pace, which in the 1930s rivaled that of Howard Hawks' screwball comedies, to a near-comatose crawl.

One reason Swing Vote works so well is that it doesn't sentimentalize its hero (if you can call him that), Bud Johnson; in the film's early scenes, his job loss is clearly not that of the economy or the system, but his own damn fault.

(This movie is far more honest in its discussion of the immigration issue than this year's heavily manipulative indie smash The Visitor.) This gives Kevin Costner the opportunity to do what he does best: here, as in Bull Durham and The Upside of Anger, he plays a fundamentally OK but deeply flawed good guy, with the emphasis on flawed.

His personal Jiminy Cricket (whom, thanks to his very heavily liquid diet, he's usually too woodenheaded to pay much heed to) is his conscientious, civic-minded daughter Molly (newcomer Madeleine Carroll, who, had this movie gotten better reviews or box office, would have been instantly set up as the next Abigail Breslin).

She begs him to vote for the next President, but since he's busy proving why maybe the old practice of closing the bars on Election Day wasn't such a bad idea after all, she takes matters into her own small hands,with resulting complications that, while totally impossible to conceive 10 years ago, subsequent history has made just amusingly improbable now.

The Electoral College renders Bud's one mere do-over vote the deciding factor in who takes the White House; as a result, the Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and his Democratic challenger (Dennis Hopper) and their respective campaign managers (Stanley Tucci, Nathan Lane) go to absurd, often hilarious and occasionally chilling lengths to suck up to Bud and secure his loyalty.

Those who slam Swing Vote's satire as being toothless forget that Claude Rains in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, while the villain, wasn't a bad person but a decent, idealistic one who got corrupted along the way.

..sadly, in almost 70 years the more things change the more they remain the same (a hard lesson for those of us who thought that John Edwards was the greatest guy in American politics only to recently learn that he's as human as the rest of us).

That's why the evenhanded Swing Vote, in true Capra fashion, works as nicely as it does, even if, like me, you have issues with what it chooses to do and not do in its final 10 minutes; neither candidate (or campaign manager, somewhat surprisingly) is evil at all.

Thus, even though Swing Vote scores some of its biggest points and laughs by parallelling Hopper's inability to relate to the so-called "common man" with John Kerry's, Michael Dukakis's and Walter Mondale's similar ineptitude, Grammer's GOP antagonist is, unlike the current office holder, charming, intelligent and silver-tongued (if a bit patronizing).

In the Swing Vote universe there are no equivalents to Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or George W. you-know-who.