TV

I will excerpt here the email that summarized the common point of these readers' emails:

"It's not just fair and accurate, it's also pretty good." (that's a line from my story)

"You were kidding....right?

Statements like that only serve to denude you of any credibility."

To a lot of right-minded people, Recount was indefensibly left-leaning. I get that. If I had to guess whether Jay Roach and/or screenwriter Danny Strong identified themselves as Democrat or Republican, I would guess Democrat. I guess. Then again, if either of them told me they were Republican (or Libertarian or independents or Maoists, for that matter), I wouldn't be surprised. Are there scenes in Recount which seem to sympathize with the Gore-supporting Democrats -- yes. But I also think that in a fundamental way (to a degree that surprised me, at least), the movie takes the Republican side in the way it portrays James Baker and his position.

From the word "go," the movie's James Baker grasps that what is occuring is a contest in which one side is going to win and one is going to lose and he is going to make sure his side plays to win. There's no intimation of some evil agenda or nefarious underpinnings -- he is committed to winning and directs all of his actions and choices to that purpose. The Democrats, meanwhile, are mired in equivocation, conflict and philosophical debate. The real Warren Christopher has been quoted in numerous publications objecting to his portrayal in the film, and understandably so. As played by John Hurt (beautifully, I may add) he is uncomprehending, aloof and ineffectual. He just doesn't seem to get what's happening.

But even as I was shaking my head in frustration at his head-in-the-clouds obliviousness, another part of me was agreeing with him. Mr. Hurt, as Mr. Christopher, delivers this almost Shakespearean soliloquy in which he tells his raging seconds who are desperate to start duking it out that there are more important issues at stake than who wins this election, about not wanting to win the office by using tactics that don't live up to the office. It was a funny, powerful moment because as wrong as he was, he was also right.

One of the things I said to Mr. Roach was that I admired the way the movie doesn't just try to make some superficial show of showing "both sides." In this hyper-partisan era, we've been trained to view everything in binary terms -- one side or its opposite. But almost nothing in life is really like that and what I appreciate in Recount -- a movie that is stepping into a black-and-white, we-right/they're-wrong scenario -- is that it tries to show both sides of both sides. What Mr. Roach said about his movie's depiction of Warren Christopher was this: "Sending in Warren Christopher was like throwing a poet-philosopher into a wrestling ring and that's what we tried to show."

Anyway, to (some) readers' objections that the movie is blatantly biased in its pro-Democrats perspective, I would say that I both agree and disagree. I think the ways that the movie favors the Democrats is offset by the ways in which it favors the Republicans, but even if you don't think so, I would argue that in terms of the movie's central theme, the message I took from it, which side won or should have won doesn't even matter. What I took from the movie was that the problem wasn't the result of the 2000 election, but the process. The question I felt it raised wasn't about whether Gore should have won instead of Bush, but rather "is this the best that the world's leading democracy can do?"

When I told Mr. Roach that the effect of his movie was to leave me feeling a little queasy and asking myself this question, he said "all I can say is I'm sorry and thank you. Because that's what we were trying to get at it. Are you okay with this process, with how it worked? However you feel about one side or the other, is this the way our system should work, that you can go to an ATM machine and transfer money with more confidence than you can go to a ballot box and cast your vote and be sure it's counted correctly."