Reply #3: The Woman At the Eye of the Bush/Gore Storm [View All]

[livvy]

The woman at the eye of the Bush/Gore storm
TV MOVIE REVIEW | Dern dominates 'Recount'

May 25,2008
BY ROGER EBERT Film Critic

Katherine Harris was a piece of work. The Florida secretary of state during the 2000 elections is not intended to be the leading role in "Recount," an HBO docudrama about that lamentable fiasco, but every time Laura Dern appears on the screen, she owns it. Watch her stride into a room of powerful men, pick up a little paper packet of sugar for her coffee and shake it with great sweeping arm gestures as if she were a demonstrator in an educational film.

As much as anyone, Harris was responsible for George W. Bush being declared the winner of the state vote, and thus of the presidency. In a bewildering thicket of controversy about chads, hanging chads, dimpled chads, military ballots, voting machines and nearsighted elderly voters, it was her apparent oblivion that prevented a meaningful recount from ever taking place. Don't talk to me about the Florida Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court or even the hero of the film, a Democratic Party strategist named Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey). They had a great influence on events, but it was Harris who created a shortage of time that ultimately had a greater effect than anything else.


And this is the fascinating part, the part that Dern exploits until her performance becomes mesmerizing: Harris did it without seeming to know what she was doing. Although she was the head of Bush's Florida campaign, she bats her eyelashes in innocence while announcing a "firewall" isolating her office from anyone, Democrat or Republican, lest they affect her worship of the power of law. After that announcement, it is the merest detail that the film portrays two GOP strategists moving into her office and giving her suggestions. They include her when talking about what "we" have to do.

But even in the privacy of her office, she never quite seems to know what they are doing or why. She signals that her mind is operating in more elevated, more long-range, dimensions. She sees it all as an adventure starring herself, and sometimes seems to be thanking her classmates for electing her homecoming queen. "Ten years ago," she tells her minders in a wondering voice, "I was teaching the chicken dance to seniors, and now I've been thrust into a political tempest of historical dimensions."

more...

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/television/968939,SHO-Sunday-ebert25.article