Bud Johnson takes a seat in front of two presidential candidates. They are participating in a historical debate for which he is the lone questioner. He’s a beer drinker, a recently canned egg-factory worker and the powerfully immature if loving father of a bright 12-year-old daughter named Molly, who knows more about the democratic process than most.
When he opens his mouth, Bud wades deeper and deeper into a soliloquy straight out of one of those Frank Capra flicks that gave such fine voice to our better selves.
No, it’s not as indelible as James Stewart’s desperation-soaked filibuster in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” It’s quieter.
But in a season that finds two men named McCain and Obama vying for the nation’s highest office, the words that Bud utters toward the end of this political comedy starring Kevin Costner resonate.
Movies may not have a quantifiable impact on elections. But Bud’s speech reminds us that they have a powerful way of connecting an electorate to how it is feeling about those it elects.
Bud isn’t so light, after all.
“When Bud has to dig down as deep as he can and he comes up with words like ‘giants,’ it’s not even lost on elitists or someone well versed in the world of politics. It was inside his language, inside his vocabulary,” says Kevin Costner of his dented everyman.
“If you want to articulate what we really need, we need a giant or someone to behave as one,” the actor-producer says. Someone, Bud says, who can “get ahead of our problems.”
“Swing Vote” is one of the first in a number of politically themed movies headed into local theaters in this season abuzz with political and civic-minded activity.
Come August, Starz will turn the FilmCenter on the Auraria campus into a hub of flicks and panels, a VIP green room for the credentialed. Included in the ambitious programming is the IMPACT Film Festival ’08. Among the films: the World Trade Organization-inspired feature, “Battle in Seattle,” with Charlize Theron; this year’s Oscar-winning short documentary, “Freeheld,” about a lesbian police officer trying to pass on her death benefits to her partner; and “Trouble the Water,” a powerfully personal documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro’s “Body of War,” about an injured Iraq veteran, is due to open at the Chez Artiste.
The Cinemocracy online film festival (cinemocracy ) will kick into its highest gear when it begins screening its top 10 films, voted on by visitors to the website during the Democratic National Convention. (They’ll screen at the Republican National Convention too.) The theme for the five-minutes-or-shorter movies: “How Do You Define Democracy?”
Currently shooting in Louisiana, “W,” Oliver Stone’s biopic on President Bush, is trying to bulldoze its way toward an October release.
One man, one vote
In “Swing Vote,” opening Friday, the presidential race has come down to the electoral votes of one Western state, one county, one town, one polling place, one voter and his vote, which because of a malfunction, went uncounted.
Thanks to his civic-minded daughter, the profoundly apathetic Bud now has the decisive vote. State law allows him to recast his ballot in 10 days.
Welcome to the most micro-targeted presidential campaign ever. Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper play Republican incumbent and Democratic challenger. Men of ideals, they nevertheless waver, prodded by their calculating advisers (Stanley Tucci and Nathan Lane).
If “Swing Vote” were a romantic comedy, the couple in question would be the American voter and that taken-for-granted dame, democracy. There’s something deeply moving in that setup, something before and beyond partisanship.
“I travel around the world talking to other nations’ parliamentarians about voting and democracy,” says Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“It’s embarrassing to tour the world and talk with these people who look to our system and for us to have such low participation. It’s very cliche to say every vote counts. But there are a lot of examples where it does.”
Eight years ago, Costner saw a billboard that read “92 Million People in Last Year’s Election Made a Difference. They Didn’t Vote.”
“It struck me like a bolt of lightning,” he says.
Getting people talking
As soon as you start throwing around the term “political movie,” you’ll be hard pressed to find consensus on what that means, though there is no shortage of subgenres. Greats like “The Manchurian Candidate” and “An Inconvenient Truth” come immediately to mind if you mean films that have muscled their way into public and policy debates. And then there’s Mi chael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Sicko.”
” ‘Sicko’ really got people talking,” says Storey. “I remember going to the doctor’s office and having a long conversation with the doctor about how bad the system is.”
But the movie he liked most, says Storey, who spends a great deal of time in the company of lawmakers, is “Charlie Wilson’s War.” “It’s not too far off the mark,” he says.
Denver Film Society Festival director Britta Erickson, who helped spearhead the Cinemocracy project, puts Alexander Payne’s satire “Election” (1999) and Barry Levinson’s “Wag the Dog” (1997) high on her list.
Personally, I’m partial to Capra’s quasi-comedic movies. The first time I saw “State of the Union” (1948) was during the Clinton White House years. The marital-political quandaries of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s characters (he’s an industrialist drafted to run for office; she’s his estranged wife) felt uncanny and instructional.
In Capra films as disparate as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” one finds a celebration of individual and rallied community triumph — not so much over as in spite of systemic, unchecked greed.
As for the comedy he stars in and funded, Costner is hopeful, not highfalutin, about its prospects.
“It’s not ‘Thirteen Days,’ it’s not ‘JFK.’ It’s an American comedy,” he says. “And I’m content with that.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom /madmoviegoer
