Recount: HBO's Election 2000 Nostalgia

Posted by Howie Klein, Down With Tyranny! at 8:32 AM on May 27, 2008.

It was a strange feeling sort-of-watching HBO Films' Recount, a recounting of the 2000 Florida presidential election recount drama, last night.

I only sort-of-watched because, to begin with, I had forgotten about it until Howie mentioned it while we were talking, which turned out to be about 50 minutes into the thing. So then I set the DVR to record the 1am (ET) replay, but I also sort-of-watched the rest of the 9pm showing. And then this morning I watched some of the beginning.

Of course it's not difficult to get into the plot, whose outlines remain all too familiar even after all these years. At the same time, there's always that problem when you're watching a fictionalized version of real events--and you have to assume it's fictionalized when the re-creation is being presented as anything other than a documentary--the problem being that you never quite know what's God's-honest-truth and what isn't. (Howie suggests that this is like watching CNN. I can't argue.)

So you watch, sort of mentally checking stuff off: oh yeah, the Palm Beach ballot, and the Crazy Woman (I'd just as soon not mention her name) playing fast and loose with election law, essentially making it up as she goes, and the respectable-looking gangs of thugs sent by the GOP recount command to intimidate the Miami-Dade County recount, and on and on.

You get a sort of different response when there's a character or detail you don't remember. Did this or something like it really happen? For example, with Kevin Spacey clearly cast as the star of the show, you sort of figure there must have been a Ron Klain, who had been Vice President Al Gore's chief of staff until he was forced out by the machinations of later-to-be-ousted-himself campaign director Tony Coelho, at which point Ron was brought back into the campaign in a humiliatingly lower position, and wound up being the Democratic point man on the recount. They wouldn't have made that all up. Would they?

As the thing unreels, you never quite figure out what the point of the exercise is, except maybe for people who are truly unfamiliar with these events, or want to test their recollection/understanding of them -- or perhaps to remind us of the evil that was to follow, the reign of terror that was ultimately unleashed by our very own election-fixing Supreme Court.

I guess what leaves me most uneasy is that the film stirs all this stuff up without giving us a clue as to what we're supposed to do with/about it all.

It should go without saying that in the very act of casting you're slanting the material, and by and large the process tends to favor the Republicans, at least when the process is controlled by people who are trying to be fair (in other words, not to be confused with, for example, ABC's patented far-right-wing faux-docu-hatchet-job unit), if only because casting basically normal people tends to whack off the extremities of a pack of vicious, slimy characters.

Laura Dern, for example, is an interesting choice for Krazy Katherine (oops, I let part of her name slip). As an out-there actress, she's willing to give us an intimation of not-too-brightness and even of not-too-saneness, but she still manages to suggest that this is, on balance, a more or less balanced individual. Of course the editorial decision not to have the makeup crew do even a partial let alone a full Katherine on the handsome Ms. Dern also unbalances the portrait in the direction of nonexistent balance.

Or there's the casting of the almost always interesting Tom Wilkinson as Jim Baker, the GOP jack-of-all-trades-slash-enforcer (and bosom buddy of the Republican presidential candidate's Poppy) sent in to do whatever had to be done to save Florida, and the election, for the party. At this point Wilkinson has Americanized himself so successfully that he didn't even need the vaguely Texan twang to hide his English origins. I suspect that most viewers had no idea that he is English. But we inveterate watchers of British TV on public television and cable know him as one of his home country's busiest actors, with a fascinating ability to create characters who seem to be likable except for a certain something that you can't dismiss (and that usually turns out to conceal serious personality disorders). I couldn't help thinking that Wilkinson's performance lent the wily Baker more dignity than he deserves.

In the end, I was mostly reminded of the basic truth about a difference between the major parties in modern U.S. history: Where Democrats often (not always, but often) attempt to get to the truth of a factual issue, Republicans (pretty much always) just want to win. Oh, Recount shows us plenty of Republicans who seem sincerely to believe that it's the Democrats who are trying to steal the election, but it seems clearly that they're either ideologically blinkered or just not very bright.

At one point, Spacey's Ron Klain laments that he just wants to find out who really won Florida. Of course we have no way of knowing whether such a person ever thought or said such a thing, but it's also quite clear that no such thing could ever have been thought or said by anyone on the GOP side.

No doubt the less ingenuous of those GOP-ers justify their unconcern-bordering-on-contempt for truth with reference to their possession of a "higher" truth that seems to be the birthright of the modern Loony Right, a delusion most fully incarnated in the otherwise-bewildering person of "Big Dick" Cheney, a man who has probably unleashed and enforced more lies than any individual on record, all of it presumably justified by his unshakable belief in the demented nerve firings ricocheting around his corroded brain.

In this regard, the pragmatic Jim Baker does stand apart from the modern-day GOP elite--he's of that older generation of Republicans personified by his pal George H. W. Bush, so resolutely repudiated by George W. And in this regard, it was probably sensible to put as interesting actor as Tom Wilkinson in the part. My quibble is that Wilkinson is probably too interesting an actor, and winds up lending the character more dimension than I suspect he in fact has.

I'm curious as to how other people have reacted to Reunion. As suggested, I found myself focusing most on the long-term effect of where we know the story is headed, and maybe that is the idea. When, at the end, after the Supreme Court has played fairy godmother to W., the poor sincere, stoogelike Republican counsel played by Bob Balaban (a famous liberal, isn't he?), blithers at the end that the shame of Bill Clinton is about to be erased, can the intended effect be anything but ironic?

We know all too well that what the Court election-fixers in fact unleashed on the country was a regime that, heedless of the thinness of its "victory," was about to unleash an assault on reason, decency, international comity, democracy, and honest government -- all wrapped in a mantle of near-sociopathic ineptitude -- without precedent in U.S. history.

The only thing is, is there anyone out there who had somehow managed to forget this lesson?