Swing Vote

Behavioral economists argue that voting is an irrational act; that is, because an individual vote counts for so little, any investment of time and energy is simply wasted. Though over two months of the Constitutional Convention was spent debating the relative value of an individual's vote, the economist would argue that the only time your vote matters is if there was a dead tie in a state whose electoral votes decide the election — or, the same odds as winning the Powerball jackpot 128 consecutive times. Swing Vote imagines that the virtually impossible happens, a brilliant conceit that should tee-up some biting satire: The two presidential candidates have to figure out how to win the heart and mind of, essentially, a Hillary voter living in New Mexico.

Swing Vote, however, can't figure out whether it wants to be Capra or The Candidate. It wants you to think it's a "mad as hell!" satire, but director/co-writer Joshua Michael Stern and co-writer Jason Richman can't help but preach, as if they believe audiences don't think that voting is important! Rather than zero in on the fundamental hypocrisies of the two parties, or the soul-sucking nature of the process itself, Stern stuffs his movie with grade-school civics lessons. There's the obligatory scene with the precocious little girl who wants to be "a veterinarian or Chairman of the Fed, I don't know which," delivering an essay to her fourth grade class on the "social contract" of democracy. And don't forget the local TV news bunny who struggles with exploiting the girl for her career or being a capital-J journalist ("I have integrity, like Paula Zahn," which isn't meant as a joke), or the boxes of letters from "real people who need someone to speak for them" that become the center of the big presidential debate.

Still, the film's problems run far deeper than preachiness. Bud (Kevin Costner), a good ol' boy forever adorned by his Bass Pro hat, works at the local egg sorting plant that's being overrun by Mexicans. After work, Bud heads down to the local watering hole, where he plays foosball and drinks The King of Beers, which in itself has unwittingly become a symbol of the decline of the American empire. That precocious schoolgirl is his daughter Molly (newcomer Madeline Carroll), who wakes him up through a hangover, clears the empties from the nightstand and struggles to get him in the truck and off to work and school.

The role of parent and child are reversed: Molly is a hyper-articulate, overly gifted wise-child straight out of a Spielberg movie; Bud is a drunken, barely employed, smelly, unshaven excuse for a father who can't shake off the Budweiser-induced cobwebs long enough to drive his daughter to school. Even though Molly is some sort of genius, he doesn't see the need for education ("Civic responsibility? Where are you learning this crap?"). Still, Bud promises her he'll vote (she registered him by mail and forges his signature at the poll, which would never have happened in Indiana), which puts in motion the whole "swing vote" conceit.

Bud isn't just some slob who sees the rationale in not voting. His introductory scenes suggest that he has no interest in Molly's future; you get the sense that he doesn't even see a duty to keep her off the pole. The set design communicates all these same bad vibes — you can almost smell the stale beer and musty carpet in their home.

The direction, though, presents something like an Idyllic Trailer Park motif. The sun rises over the parked metal houses to gentle guitar music that could very well be selling $4 coffee; semis pull out a Phillips 66 station like lions rising at dawn. This isn't the depressed American small town of today, hanging on by a life support system of social services and service industry jobs — the place a guy like Bud actually lives in. It's a fantasy straight out of Lou Dobbs' imagination, a nirvana for salt-of-the-earth working class Americans who love their double wides as long as the rabbit ears still pick up the NASCAR.

You can smell the inauthenticity and condescension — Swing Vote seems like it was written by the kind of guy who talks about Applebee's salad bar. Stern's film panders like an elitist politician: He doesn't want to insult the good people of Middle America (you know, clinging to their guns and religion), so he glosses over its very real problems: Rising unemployment, increasing prevalence of alcoholism and drugs, and substandard housing, education and health care. There's a lot to love about living in small town America, but Bud is so flippant about losing his job, so "funny" when stumbling drunkenly to his truck, so dedicated to getting to the fishing hole despite the fact that he's got a daughter to somehow support, that the film simply doesn't take small town life seriously. By not meeting these issues head-on, Stern's film looks down on small towns: We'd love our tin-shack paradise if only those damn Mexicans weren't taking our jobs. In fact, the movie celebrates lazy, complacent, uneducated, welfare-state alcoholics as Real Americans, so unlike those latte-sipping city pansies.

This condescension infects Stern's portrait of Bud, limiting the satiric potential. Bud is the lovable louse — Dudley Moore's Arthur by way of John Goodman's Dan Conner. But because the writers establish that Bud is a neglectful father to his precocious daughter, the stakes are too high for light-hearted humor. There's none of "Roseanne"'s make-a-better-life-for-your-family desperation underlying Bud's working-class existence, so the attempt to make Bud "likable" rings false. Instead, when Bud's family is on the verge poverty, he mocks his daughter's success in school and he's too hungover to work. Yet to Swing Vote this is all a joke: When he drinks at work and knocks over a pallet of eggs, it's played for a laugh even though Bud is about to lose his ability to provide for his child. One of the biggest laughs of the film is Bud's well-rehearsed drill (grabbing a Bible and a crucifix necklace) to answer the door for "Child Services." The cruel irony is that the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department might actually have a case for intervention if Bud were to remain unemployed and unable to get his daughter to school.

Not only is Stern's central character wrong, the clumsy writing stretches the run time to 45 minutes before Air Force One lands at the Albuquerque airport. By this point, Stern has strangled the film with plot strands that are supposed to make Important Points: the idealistic "journalist," the teacher touching kids' lives, Molly's conspicuously interracial friendship with a boy in her class, and broad swipes at the Chris Matthews-led talkocracy.

Once we finally get to the political satire, Stern's broad jokes belly-flop. True to form, the Republican president (Kelsey Grammer) is a boob; his Rove (Stanley Tucci) is a shark. The Democratic nominee (Dennis Hopper) is a clueless bleeding heart who runs on "issues;" his Bob Shrum (Nathan Lane) is an idealist who's lost seven campaigns, though they've all "meant something." Fair enough, and points for invoking Rove and Shrum, but an hour's worth of predictable scenes of extreme pandering follow, featuring cameos by Richard Petty and Willie Nelson (you can guess which candidate sent whom), and Bud throwing post patterns to Secret Service agents. The Democrat is throttled by the kick of a hunting rifle; the Republican compares the North Korean negotiations to football. And so on.

In fact, the whole of Stern's satire can be summed up by this Onion article, with a pinch of this "South Park" episode. Molly is disgusted by Bud and President Boone bonding over beers (the old cliche about voting for a guy you can have a beer with); she can't stand that the Democrats reassembled Bud's Willie Nelson tribute band. Bud is yukking it up and soaking in the attention when there is so much at stake!

Swing Vote does have its moments, particularly Hopper's political ad against "in-sourcing," featuring the candidate walking toward the camera as Mexicans scamper across the desert. More disappointingly, it seems like Stern, in some draft, actually had written some sharp satire. The public starts to turn on Bud, thinking he's "a dumbass" and "ruining America" — finally catching up to observant viewers who caught the suggestion in the first five minutes of the film that politicians encourage ignorant white trash culture in the name of Main Street values. Instead of following this idea and showing how it's furthering our economic and cultural stagnation, however, Stern instead goes back to preaching about voting and gives Bud a change of heart, complete the equivalent of a sports montage to bone up for his big debate.

Swing Vote lumbers toward the finish because there's too many loose strands to tie up, all of which are designed to guilt the audience into believing in the power of civic duty. Molly finally hectors her dad into caring about his vote, and by the time Swing Vote's sermon is over, the audience has been nagged so much that your ticket should come with a jury duty form. In other words, the movie treats the audience as if we're Bud Johnson — the guy who just 10 minutes ago the movie called a dumbass. If Stern would have treated Bud seriously — that is, not glossing over his faults — he might have become a symbol of American decline. But he didn't, so his point isn't that America is becoming dumber than a fifth grader; rather, Stern's would-be satire becomes a second-hand civics lesson from a fifth grader. But because Molly is ten years away from a course in Behavioral Economics, she doesn't realize the irony: Your vote is only important if you're Bud Johnson in the movie Swing Vote.