Our Brand is Crisis – Review by David Turpin

Directed by David Gordon Green

Starring Sandra Bullock, Billy Bob Thornton, Ann Dowd

Seguing from his understated early features (George Washington, All the Real Girls) into ribald comedies (Pineapple Express, The Sitter), and then back to small-town melancholia (Prince Avalanche, Manglehorn), director David Gordon Green is nothing if not unpredictable.  Whether one interprets his zigzagging as versatility or disarray, it’s a singular characteristic that might equally be applied to his new film, sort-of-true-political-comedy-drama-thingumabob Our Brand is Crisis.

Derived from Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same name, Green’s heavily fictionalised feature involves burned-out political consultant Jane (Sandra Bullock), who is tempted back into action to help re-elect a Bolivian president – facing off against arch nemesis Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), who has been engaged by the opposing side.  Naturally, mud is flung on both personal and political levels, before Jane comes to a dawning awareness of the broader context within which she is working, and how the candidate she is tasked with ‘selling’ might actually affect the society he governs.

The principal difficulty of Our Brand is Crisis is the way in which its self-avowed ‘cynicism’ about politics and PR clashes with its imperatives as a studio comedy in which the credits cannot roll until valuable lessons have been learned.  At worst, the film short-changes its subject in order to indulge in a different kind of cynicism – cynicism about its form and its assumed audience, more than its subject.  Like its own heroine, the film appears to believe that anything can be made palatable if it appeals to sentiment over interrogation.

The saving grace of the film is Bullock, who makes the most of a part tailored to her strengths, and very nearly rescues the film from its own discordancy.  If Our Brand is Crisis is a muddled compromise as satire, it succeeds well enough as an old-fashioned star vehicle, in which the scenario is largely incidental to the pleasures of watching the leading lady command the screen.  As such, much as Green might like his film to be likened to politically forthright features of the 1970s – and to more recent attempts such as the ersatz but entertaining Argo (2012) – its most meaningful relationship is with something older again, the Warner Bros. and MGM potboilers of the 1930s and 1940s, with Bullock and Thornton valiantly attempting a kind of latter-day Hepburn and Tracy dynamic.  Their efforts don’t reach that level, but as stars increasingly fade out of major studio filmmaking in favour of outsized spectacle, Our Brand is Crisis offers, if little else, a salutary lesson in how the right talent can still pull a faulty vehicle across the finish line.