Our Brand is Crisis Review

February 28, 2006 11:28 AM
by [email]

Our Brand is Crisis is an impressive, thought provoking and award winning documentary from first-time director Rachel Boynton, which examines the role of American political consultants in the 2002 Bolivian presidential elections.

Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, ubiquitously known as “Goni,” wants to be Bolivia’s next president. He’s seventy-two years old, speaks Spanish with an American accent (he grew up in D.C.) and loves pink shirts. He’s no stranger to Bolivian politics, having previously been president from 1993 to 1997 (in Bolivia a president can be elected to two terms, but not consecutively)--however, he has one big problem--he’s not very popular.

At one point, he’s told that, for 55% of the Bolivian electorate, the only question about him is "how high the gallows should be." So, he brings in the big guns, the American consulting firm of Greenberg Carville Shrum (“GCS”). Yes, that James Carville. You thought he only ran around making fun of Republicans? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

When our story begins, it is three months until the elections and Manfred Reyes Villa, is in control, with Goni trailing and coca growers advocate and indigenous campesino leader Evo Morales rattling the cages in third place--in Bolivia an advocate for cocaine growers can be a serious candidate for President.

The GCSers come in with polls, charts and focus groups to save the day. In one scene, we see Jeremy Rosner (former Clinton special advisor and polling expert who in many ways is the “star” of the film) seriously discussing the importance of one and two percentage movements in a variety of esoteric likeability factors that even CNN’s Bill Schneider couldn’t have thought up.

Why such fractional movement is important, in a country where polling margin for error must really mean something, is beyond me. But I’m not a highly paid polling expert.

Anyway, GCS structures an American style media blitz to convince the Bolivian people Goni is their guy--which is an uphill climb, since the general consensus appears to be that Goni is pompous, rich, out of touch and in bed with too many foreign nations (which seems to be a pretty accurate assessment).

At first, it doesn’t work and Goni is sliding backwards in the polls amidst complaints his campaign is too negative. So what do you do when negative campaigning isn’t working? Why attack even harder, in order to scare the people into voting for your candidate.

Thanks to Boyton’s amazing access, we get to see discussions on how to build a corruption scandal against Manfred without it being attributable to Goni (it works) and the consultants actually utter the film’s title, saying that their brand, i.e., their campaign theme, “is” crisis. It is “it’s the economy stupid” Bolivian style. Don’t convince the people everything is ok, convince them it is even worse than they feared and that only Goni can save the country.

Along the way, the American ambassador attacks Evo--which immediately makes him more popular and that, combined with Manfred’s fall from grace creates a three horse race to the wire as election day approaches. I won’t tell you who wins, as Boynton has repeatedly said she wants the film to first and foremost be a political thriller.

As a political thriller, it works, yet if that’s all it was, I wouldn’t urge you to go see it. What elevates this movie is what happens next--think murder in the streets, riots, resignations--and Boynton’s interviews with Rosner, Carville and other GSCers about what went wrong, why it went wrong and exporting America’s “brand” of democracy to other countries (Bolivia is not an exception, Carville and company do this all over the world).

We discover that, while their tactics are all about engineering victory through manipulation, for which they are highly paid, they are also true believers and think they’re working for the right cause and the right people. But seeing the ease with which they manipulate and engineer elections “American style,” raises serious questions about the American brand of democracy they want to, and are, exporting around the world.

To search for a criticism, Boynton perhaps misses out on an opportunity for an even more profound movie by focusing on making this a tightly paced thriller. I would have loved to learn more about the Bolivian political structure, with more focus on the aftermath. However, Boynton told me such attempts destroyed the pacing. She’s probably right.

While I would have enjoyed a longer, more nuanced, 2.5 hour movie, this tightly done 87 minute movie is at times hilarious, at times profound, thoroughly enjoyable and probably will put more “voters” in their seats than my version would have. All in all, an impressive directorial debut for Rachel Boynton, who began working on this movie when she was only 27.

Our Brand is Crisis opens in NYC at the Film Forum on March 1, 2006 and nationwide later in the month.