Dark Star

I watched the HBO movie Recount over the holiday weekend, and was impressed overall. There are several fantastic performances, one of which is not Laura Dern.

Kathrine Harris is vilified and made out to be a delusional idiot. While her resemblance to Harris is striking, her performance is a superficial caricature. It's my sense that everyone on the production was standing off -camera encouraging Dern with winks and snickers, but by the time her funnies reach the viewer at home, they are thin and flat as a sheet of paper.

Other than that, however, the film is excellent. For those of us who followed the news minute to minute during that time, seeing a representation of what happened behind the scenes was extremely interesting.

Other than the Kathrine Harris thing, I found the film fair to both sides. Tom Wilkinson's performance as James Baker was brilliant. And his speech to the team a the end of the film was pitch perfect as he tells them what every critic will say of the election results, how those results were found, and what he response should be.

That the recount happened at all (beyond the automatic machine recount triggered by the result margin) is a disgrace. The shameless scraping for votes from any where and in any way, shows the greed for the power the Gore side felt. That's not to say that greed didn't exist on the Bush side, it may very well have, but the fact that Bush won the election served to put them on defense rather than offense, leaving the lust for power, and to what extent it existed, unexposed.

For the Gore folks, it's laid out for all to see. And it's kind of ugly. Kevin Spacey in the lead role as a Gore manager, says in one scene, 'You know what I really want to know? Who won this election - Who won the f****ing thing!?"

At this point in the film, we, the viewers are supposed to feel his frustration. Liberals, no doubt would feel his frustration. Phrased as it is, though, we are meant to believe that those on the Gore team simply wanted to have every vote count. But the actions of these same characters in this very film belie that as their primary motive. What the Spacey character really wants, is to see that Gore had really won the election, and is shown in a later scene, sarcastically thanking Joe Lieberman for saying on TV that the military absentee ballots should count.

I was amused, though, when one Gore staffer come rushing in and announces that people had been turned away at the polls for having names similar to that of convicted felons. The movie puts the number at 20,000 (non-felons). Then says most of them were African American. And this is bad because African Americans vote Democrat over 80%.

But here's the thing: Felons, by and large, are liars. So why would they use their real name when going to the polls when they know their right to vote has been revoked? And aliases are usually something similar to the person's real name because they are easier for the felon to remember.

No, I'm not amused that innocent people and good citizens, even Liberal Democrats, were turned away at the polls who shouldn't have been. But for me, this is a great example of Liberal policies coming back to bite them, because here is yet another fantastic reason for voters to show photo I.D. when they show up to vote. That would take care of the problem.

Good, but not great, movie overall. I'd give it three out of five stars.

Pajamas Media covers it here.

The Corner covers it here.

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