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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

No recount needed here

Like most of us, Denis Leary is still ticked at Kevin Spacey for "Superman Returns."

For those of us who still feel the sting of the 2000 presidential election and its bitter endgame, HBO’s “Recount” can feel like watching the Titanic sink in slow motion.
Director Jay Roach, who took over for the late Sydney Pollack in the months before his death, and an excellent cast give us a peek inside the smoke-filled rooms and campaign headquarters of George W. Bush and Al Gore during the tumultuous weeks of Florida’s doomed recount, and the result is part effervescent drama, part gloomy dark comedy.

The mostly Emmy-nominated cast is headed by Kevin Spacey as Gore advisor Ron Klain. In possibly his juiciest role since “American Beauty,” Spacey, along with Denis Leary and Ed Begley Jr., portray the Gore camp in a sympathetic but almost wholly impotent light. Meanwhile, Laura Dern (embodying the creepy Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris), Bob Balaban and Tom Wilkinson interject a fiery resourcefulness into their portrayals of the Bush camp.

The movie doesn’t take obvious sides in the matter, except to suggest that the eventual intervention by the Supreme Court to halt the recount process was in direct contrast to everything we hold dear about our “of the people, by the people, for the people” democracy.

Roach and writer Danny Strong provide a decent full-length commentary track on this single-disc edition, and the supplements are bolstered by a couple of interesting conversations between Spacey, Balaban and their real-life counterparts Ron Klain and Ben Ginsberg. For those who just can’t get enough of the sad drama that was the 2000 Florida recount, also included is a mini-doc on the whole sordid mess. It’s torturous stuff, but should probably be shown to high school government students in the future.

This being a crucial election year, movies like “Recount” strike a little closer to home than the average political fare, if only because there always looms the threat of such an electoral disaster happening again. Roach, Strong and an engaging cast manage to nail the prime characteristics of both sides (Republicans: ruthless, logical, calculating; and Democrats: determined, intellectual, fragile), to suggest that even in the most tempestuous of political climates, there’s still hope for our Constitution to prevail.

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