Try Again

By Josh Bell

Thursday, May 22, 2008 | 2:40 p.m.

It’s surprising that it’s taken nearly eight years for someone to make a movie about the 2000 presidential election dispute. We’ve already had several about the more recent and much more traumatic 9/11 attacks, and the Florida vote recount seems like an issue that would be far less touchy and emotional. Yet the new TV movie Recount (HBO, May 25, 9 p.m.) takes such a balanced, cautious approach to the subject matter that you’d think it was the Holocaust rather than a controversy over how votes were processed and counted.

Some Democrats have objected to their portrayal in the film, but the truth is that almost no one comes off well in the script by first-time writer Danny Strong. As soon as it becomes clear that the vote in Florida is too close to call, advisors to both Al Gore and George W. Bush are depicted as sometimes clueless, sometimes petty, sometimes underhanded—but very rarely noble or patriotic. The primary exception to that is Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), the lawyer who headed up the Gore recount campaign and who serves as the film’s main character. Strong and director Jay Roach portray Klain as a remarkably dedicated man who sticks to his principles in the face of criticism from his superiors, and who wages a fair battle against Bush strategist James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), a far more ruthless political player.

Even Klain doesn’t come off as much of a character here; outside of an early scene or two with his wife and a nicely understated emotional response to Gore’s finally conceding, he’s all business, just another conduit for Strong and Roach to convey the dizzying array of tactics both sides employed in attempting to prevail. You’d think that a situation as inherently absurd as this would be ripe for satire in the vein of Primary Colors or Charlie Wilson’s War, and you’d doubly expect to get some from Roach, director of the Austin Powers films, as well as Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers. But Recount is almost entirely devoid of humor, instead focused intently on detailing every incremental move made by each of the participants. So there is lots of discussion of legal minutiae, but almost no sense of why that minutiae is worth caring about, or who the people discussing it are.

The one area where the movie does dip into comedy is in its clumsy portrayal of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the object of much ridicule during the recount process for her gaudy makeup and wardrobe and seemingly befuddled approach to government. Laura Dern plays Harris with a cartoonish sneer more befitting a comedy sketch than a serious film. The rest of the cast—including Spacey, Wilkinson, Denis Leary and Ed Begley Jr.—turn in fine but mostly unexceptional performances, although Spacey does imbue Klain with more personality than the script has to offer.

With all the lawsuits and countersuits, court appearances, machine recounts, hand recounts, stops and starts, eventually the movie becomes as tedious as the recount process itself, and while it may be a little more sympathetic to Gore’s side than to Bush’s, it never stakes out an ideological position to justify its existence. It’s one thing to memorialize something like 9/11 with a movie that simply states, “This happened,” but the recount cries out for a hook or perspective that does more than just reiterate what we already saw dozens of times on CNN.