Why I saw This Movie
I had never heard of it before the
other day, but I was in the video store and I saw it. I like politically humor
and I usually like Will - Ferrell. So I decided
to check it out.
The Review
There’s not a lot of deep
political satire in this movie. Despite
one candidate running as a Republican and one candidate running as a Democrat,
there’s no attempt to make any sort of partisan political humor.
What this
movie does seek to satirize is:
1) How
political campaigns are completely controlled by big money, and
2) Because
political campaigns are completely controlled by big money, the campaigns are
not about issues anymore, but instead about which candidate has the more
likeable personality.
I think
both of those presuppositions are true as far as they go, but the question is
whether the movie does an intelligent job of satirizing this. And it does not.
The plot
makes absolutely no sense, and is an insult to the intelligence of the
viewer.
The Plot (such as it
is)
Will Ferrell’s
character is a long standing senator, who gets caught in a telephone answering
machine sex scandal. The big money that
support his campaign decide he’s finished politically. (Even though it later becomes clear that in
the world of this movie, sex scandals do not hurt a politician’s credibility at
all.) And so they put all their money
into creating a rival candidate (played by Zach Galifianakis) who is the director
of local tourism and has a personality which is completely unsuited to
politics. (Zach Galifianakis playing the
political fish out of water paves the way for a lot of laughs, but plot wise it
again makes no sense. There was no one
else in the state they could have found who would have made a more suitable
candidate?)
Then after
putting lots of money into Galifianakis campaign, only when he is about to win
the election do the evil businessmen finally reveal what they want out of him—they
want him to sell his district to China and create Chinese style
sweatshops inside his district.
(First of
all, I’m not an expert, but I believe the job of a congressman is to represent
the views of his district on national issues in Washington DC. I don’t think it is within the power of a
congressman to change the local laws within his district, or sell his district
to China. Secondly, what kind of sense does it make for
the evil capitalists to pour all this money into Zach Galifianakis campaign
without bothering to check first if he is willing to do their evil
bidding? If big money really were this
stupid, it would be a non-issue.)
So then the
big money goes back to supporting Will Ferrell’s character. Which of course begs the question: why didn’t
they just do that all along in the first place?
I know, I
know, it’s just supposed to be a dumb comedy and it’s pointless to try and
nit-pick the plot like this. The plot is
supposed to be nothing more than a set-up for the jokes. But I just couldn’t look past all this when I
was watching this movie. You can watch
this movie for the jokes, but you can not watch the movie for the plot.
Nor is it a
law of nature that all comedies have to have nonsensical plots. Superior comedies have a story line that you
can get interested in even as they are giving you laughs along the way.
All that
being said, the good news is that despite having a plot that doesn’t make a
lick of sense, this is still a fun movie to watch. There are a lot of scenes in this movie which
certainly work comedically, and the ample laughs this movie
gave me while I was watching it make me willing to forgive the stupid plot.
Will Ferrell
plays a character which is not all that dissimilar from his caricature of
George W. Bush that he used to do so well. He says ridiculous things with great
conviction. He’s become so good at
playing the crowds that he can get them to cheer for just about anything if he
says it right. (America, freedom, and Jesus, he tells his campaign manager. I don’t
know what it means, but the people sure love it when I say it.) But
somewhere along the way he got separated from reality, and now he often doesn’t
understand how ridiculous he sounds to other people, and he acts like it’s
other people’s fault for not taking his ridiculous statements as serious as he
does. And when he’s in a hole, he just keeps
digging himself in deeper and deeper.
When he
accidentally dials the wrong number, and leaves an obscene phone message on a
religious family’s answering machine, Will Ferrell attempts to defend himself
like this:
“We can’t have this. It’s a behavior
that has to stop.”
Newspaper reporter: “But congressman, you made the call.”
Will Ferrell: “I have made in my lifetime probably over
one hundred thousand phone calls of which I could say maybe 1 percent have been
inappropriate. What is that, a thousand
phone calls?”
Campaign manager: That is exactly 1000
Will Ferrell: A thousand phone calls have been rude,
inappropriate, sexually explicit. Phone
calls I wish I could take back. But that’s only 1000 out of 100,000. I’ll take
those odds any day of the week.
Sure it’s an
exaggeration of the way politicians act, but, as with Ferrell’s old George W.
Bush impersonation, it’s only one or two steps removed from reality, and that’s
why it’s so funny.
Sometimes
though real life politicians are so stupid that it’s difficult for satire to
keep up (W). In that case
all the movie can do is simply replay what has already happened in real life, with
Will Ferrell putting his mock serious face over ridiculous events. So when Will Ferrell brags to his campaign
manager about how he just tweeted his mistress a picture of genitalia, he of
course acts like there’s nothing wrong with it.
(I CC’d you he says to his
campaign manager, over his campaign manager’s protests.)
The
personal attacks between the two candidates also at times seems like just an
exaggerated version of real life elections, but it reaches ridiculous
proportions, culminating with Will Ferrell’s plan to have sex with his
opponents wife, film the act, and then make it into a campaign add and put it
on TV. (I thought the conversation of
Will Ferrell’s campaign manager trying to talk him out of this plan was
particularly funny.)
There are
some brief, but funny, cameos by real life news anchors reporting on the
bizarre twists of the campaign. (It’s a
small moment, but I liked Joe Scarborough’s surprised reaction to the news
that Will Ferrell had gotten a bump in the polls from having sex with his
opponent’s wife on TV.)
To sum up:
this movie may not be very intelligent political comedy, but if you’re in a
silly mood it’s worth watching for the laughs, even if it doesn’t make any
sense.
SNAKE HANDLERS
The scene where will Ferrell gets bitten
by the snake in the church, and then unleashes a string of profanities, is one
of my favorites in the movie.
Shortly
after watching this movie I just happened to come across passages referencing
Snake Handling in two separate books I’ve been reading.
Coming from
the Midwest, I never really thought about
Snake Handling churches before, but this movie got the images stuck inn my
head. So when I came across these
sections in my reading, I thought, “Oh, of course, the Will Ferrell movie. That’s where this whole thing came from!”
In The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction
in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox (A) (book review coming soon), Fox writes:
Verses 9-20 [From Chapter 16] which now round off the Gospel [of Mark]
are plainly a pastiche by some later hand…Here,
too, there is a gain in their loss. For these are the verses which make Jesus
tell the Apostles that believers “shall take up serpents and if they drink any
deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
Christians, therefore, could handle what no prudent Jew would touch: not
only did their texts of scriptures “defile the hands” but snakes, even, would
not bite them. In 1909 these verses so impressed an American Baptist, George
Hensley, that he began to handle snakes and pass them to his neighbours at
Christian meetings. Eventually he died
of snakebite, but not until the age of seventy-five; his practice persists
among the snake-handling Churches of God in Carolina and parts of the American South
(p. 144-145).
On a related note, I’ve also
recently been reading The Age of Reason
by Thomas Paine
(A) (book review coming soon) who had this to say:
Mark concludes his book by making Jesus say
to his disciples, chap. xvi. ver. 15 “Go ye into all the world and preach to
every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that
believeth not shall be damned” (fine Popish stuff, this) “and these signs shall
follow them that believe; in my name they shall drive out devils; they shall speak with
new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it
shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”
Now, the bishop, in order to now see if
he has all this saving and wonder-working faith, should try those things upon
himself. He should take a good dose of arsenic, and if he please, I will send
him a rattle snake from America!
As for myself, as I believe in God and not at all in Jesus Christ, nor in the
books called the scriptures, the experiment does not concern me (From Part
III, Section 2. FULL TEXT HERE)
Paine,
writing in the early 19th Century, could not of course now that in the 20th
century some American Christians would actually take him up on his challenge.
(Wikipedia also
has a really interesting article on snake handlers (W)).
Link of the Day
Struggles of the PastThe Campaign: Movie Review (Scripted)
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