Bipartisan bashing

‘The Campaign’, a movie to be released in August, takes aim at a couple of candidates vying to represent  a mythical Congressional district in North Carolina, USA, writes  Michael Ceiply

Will Ferrell plays Cam Brady, apparently a Blue Dog Democrat. Zach Galifianakis is Marty Huggins, more or less a Tea Party-style Republican.

In the script they are portrayed as a couple of self-serving numbskull politicians, vying to represent a mythical 14th District of North Carolina in the US House of
Representatives.

And what happens when they meet, in a movie called The Campaign, set for release by Warner Brothers on August 10, may settle one of the tougher questions confronting an inflamed political culture: Is bipartisan humour even possible in an election year?
The disagreements have already begun.

“I’m sure this movie will bash the right and not touch the liberal left,” reads one skeptical comment that was posted this month on the generally apolitical imdb.com.

“Well, based on the trailer, they are making the Democrat character an idiot redneck, so that could be considered ‘bashing’ ” counters the next.

Directed by Jay Roach, who riled much of the political right with his recent portrayal of Sarah Palin in HBO’s political drama Game Change, The Campaign is a rare Hollywood attempt to offend both major parties precisely as their congressional and presidential campaigns hit fever pitch. (If anything, Middle America takes a drubbing, and not the first, at the hands of some Hollywood filmmakers.)

In 2008, television comedy became a political force, as Tina Fey’s mimicry of Palin on Saturday Night Live satirised her role as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, while programmes like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report stitched liberal-leaning political humour into the news.

The more conservative South Park answered back with, among other things, a post-election episode, About Last Night, in which supporters of John McCain, driven mad by the joyous backers of a victorious Barack Obama, committed suicide.

But political satire has seldom appeared in movie theatres during contentious election seasons, when politicians are crowding television screens. Films like Primary Colors, from 1998, or Wag the Dog, from 1997, landed in off-years.

(Bob Roberts, released in September 1992, was an exception, and sold few tickets. The Distinguished Gentleman, a congressional comedy with Eddie Murphy, was released in December of that year, after the election.)

It is also unusual for any picture to go as far as The Campaign in satirising contemporary political practices — its sendup of attack ads was originally supposed to include appearances by Jesus and LeBron James, but those were dropped — while struggling to avoid charges of partisanship.

“At a certain point, politics just started going into a land of crazy we had never seen before,” said Adam McKay, a producer of The Campaign.

(This raunchy comedy will almost certainly be rated R, given its language and some broad sex scenes. Think of The Ides of March meets The Hangover.)

McKay said he came up with the idea of making a film about “the nastiest congressional race ever” as a way of pairing Ferrell and Galifianakis, who were looking for a project together. Roach came on board after finishing his HBO movie Recount, about the aftermath of the Bush-Gore race, but before doing Game Change.

“A good comedy is a good comedy,” said Christopher Lehane, a Democratic political consultant who is among those who think the rough humour will work. Red or blue, Lehane added, even those caught up in the campaign frenzy will be looking for “some purple humour” by the time August arrives.

The determination of The Campaign to be seen as an equal opportunity offender is apparent both in its promotional materials and in its shooting script, written by Chris Henchy, who has produced spots for funnyordie.com, and Sean Harwell, a writer on the series Eastbound & Down.

The trailer and mock political ads to promote The Campaign mention no party affiliations at all. A recent version of the script had only one reference to Huggins, a bumbling overreacher, as being a Republican, making it clear that Brady, a feckless incumbent with John Edwards hair, is the Democrat. But the party reference was cut after tests showed that the audience preferred it that way.

“Focus groups love that it’s not right versus left,” McKay said. “It’s just two creepy guys who want to win.
”
As for the plot

Unopposed, Ferrell’s glad-handing Brady appears headed for a fifth term. But a pair of double-dealing businessmen — Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow as the Motch, not Koch, brothers — recruit Galifianakis’s unsuspecting Huggins as a candidate and as a front for schemes that involve outsourcing, downsizing and thousands of Chinese immigrants. The candidates fight, with nasty ads and, at one point, a crossbow. A baby gets punched. Everyone gets dirty.

Some close watchers are not convinced that Roach, who has contributed to Obama and other Democrats, or anyone else in the movie mainstream, can deliver political humour without putting his thumb on the scale.

“It is simply inconceivable that Hollywood could make an even-handed movie about politics,” Ben Stein, a conservative-leaning writer, wrote in an email exchange recently.
Stein particularly questioned whether the film would tread a well-worn path by making characters from the heartland the butt of its jokes, whatever their party affiliation. That would reflect a purported bias he described 33 years ago in his book, The View From Sunset Boulevard: The World as Brought to You by the People Who Make Television.
Much of the buffoonery in The Campaign involves the courting of religious believers by Democrat and Republican alike. Gay marriage, and resistance to it, figure in the script, which was written before North Carolina adopted a state constitutional measure against the practice recently.

Common sense, what little there is of it, will supposedly be supplied by a battery of cable television commentators. Anderson Cooper of CNN and Chris Matthews of MSNBC were originally among those written in, but the commentators who actually appear are likely to differ and will come from either end of the political spectrum, according to a person briefed on the film, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is not yet finished.
The movie was expected to end with a montage of moments from some of the more outlandish political ads of the years just past.
But the ad crawl was dropped, according to the person briefed on the movie, and the filmmakers, with a close eye on the headlines, are still looking for any final beats.
Asked whether he planned any special screenings in North Carolina, McKay was emphatic. “No!” he said.
But, he added, “I would love to do a premiere in Washington, DC”