Down for the Recount

Hey, political junkies, now that you’ve watched one presidential-nominating race drag on long past the exhaustion point, let’s relive the last big commander-in-chief contest! Return with me, won’t you, to the thrilling days of prolonged-battle yesteryear, when the 2000 presidential election was prematurely called by a wafer-thin margin for one candidate, then challenged by the other, hurling the nation into 36 days of ideological turmoil over hanging chads and dimpled chads, undervotes and nonvotes, purged rolls and butterfly ballots, machine-versus-manual retabulating, theft accusations, party spin, Supreme Court intervention and one conservative woman’s liberal use of blusher.

Ready for her close-up: Laura Dern as Republican hatchet woman Katherine Harris

Not ready for her close encounter: The Andromeda Strain attacks.

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More About

• Al Gore
• Katherine Harris
• Kevin Spacey
• Michael Crichton
• Laura Dern

(Click to enlarge)

Ready for her close-up: Laura Dern as Republican hatchet woman Katherine Harris

(Click to enlarge)

Not ready for her close encounter: The Andromeda Strain attacks.

The movie is HBO’s Recount, a docudrama of the fierce post–Election Day fight in Florida that determined whether George W. Bush or Al Gore would win the presidency of the United States. (Spoiler alert: The United States lost.) Written with an eye for telling detail by Danny Strong, and directed in surprisingly nimble fashion by blockbuster-comedy wrangler Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers movies and Meet the Parents fame), it has the peculiarly alchemic structure of a nail-biting tragi-farce. Minds both brilliant (Gore attorney David Boies) and eccentric (Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris), wills both energized and deflatable, and tactics both shrewd (the GOP hammering a “counted and recounted” message when that wasn’t the case) and misguided (the Dems asking for recounts in only four counties instead of statewide) were allowed to mix it up in what often felt like a surprise overtime campaign played without rule books or refs. In which case, the strong-arm, image-defining might of the Republicans — led by crafty Bush family friend James Baker III (Tom Wilkinson) — clearly had the advantage over the studious fairness-seekers on the Democratic side, spearheaded by an eager-to-prove-himself former chief of staff for Gore named Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey). As Jeffrey Toobin aptly summarized it in his Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, while Democrats “were hunched over their calculators, the Republicans were breaking bar stools over their heads.”

Needless to say, for Bush-haters and those who view Gore’s 21st-century celebritydom as little consolation for the botched 2000 run, Recount will feel like a roller-coaster ride all too often inclined toward stomach-sinking cries of “Oh, no!” than shrieks of “Woo hoo!” Every podium briefing from either the Florida legislature (Bush-leaning) or the Florida Supreme Court (liberal-packed) announcing some ruling on the matter — continue the recount, stop the recount — is the equivalent of a toggle switch turning one camp’s hopes on and the other’s off.

Roach gets a lot of suspenseful mileage out of these ping-ponging reversals of fortune. He even throws in thriller shadings of every genre stripe: The holy-shit race to stop Gore before he formalizes his concession at a televised rally is filmed like one of those ticking-time-bomb movies — complete with breathless phone calls, hand-held camera work, rain-slicked streets, a motorcade of limos heading for disaster and a hobbling aide breaking through security to intercept the target (except the assassination being prevented is a candidate’s self-defeat on camera). Later, who would have guessed that the proffering of a sneakily biased advisory opinion to a confused elections-canvassing board member would play like one of those spy-movie moments of perversely exciting infiltration? And there’s a feeling of genuine danger and physical threat in the re-creation of what became known as the Brooks Brothers riot, when organized Republican congressional staffers mobbed Miami-Dade County’s hand-recounting efforts and effectively halted them.

As for the movie’s politics, they’re fair-minded enough for something coming from Hollywood, meaning that it sticks to the fascinating nuts and bolts of both sides’ legal and PR maneuvers, matter-of-factly airs Republican grievances but gives more “quality” face time to the righteousness of Spacey’s gang, and indulges in only one case of right-wing caricature, with rubber-faced Laura Dern’s Mad TV–ready portrayal of Katherine Harris — painted and unpainted — as a Bush-loyal yet narcissistic loon.

Democrats have already begun griping that the movie wrongly tars former Secretary of State Warren Christopher as a slave to orderliness — and he is played by John Hurt with a kind of stately absence of aggression intended to be maddening — while Wilkinson is commandingly lionlike as Baker, his role confined mostly to being a formidable opponent. Spacey, meanwhile, recaptures some of the intoxicatingly mature, precision-timed excitement he used to galvanize audiences with when the movies he made were better. He’s well-teamed — 14 years after they made The Ref — with a reliably vicious-mouthed Denis Leary as Democratic strategist Michael Whouley.

If there’s a true outrage nestled in the film’s reason for being, it certainly isn’t that Gore should have won. That’s taken care of in a scene in which Klain confesses to Whouley over drinks, “You know what’s funny about all this? I’m not even sure I like Al Gore.” Rather, Recount firmly aims its activism at the notion that a well-justified hand-tabulation of Florida’s votes — one that would have cleared up the question of who earned the presidency — was sadly prevented, at first by gamesmanship, at the end by a dishonest Supreme Court, and finally by a lack of willpower. But maybe you’ve managed to “get over it,” as conservative Justice Antonin Scalia admonished all complainers to do in a recent 60 Minutes interview. In which case you won’t be nagged by the witty Citizen Kane crib at the end, a shot of a box of unrecounted ballots — the Rosebud of this story — being neatly inserted into its slot in a wall of such boxes that fill a vast warehouse. All others settling in for Recount, start your hackles and danders.