A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

I didn’t rush out and see it on opening day or anything, but I’ve been kinda sorta halfway interested in seeing Swing Vote. It’s about a presidential election that’s so close that it winds up coming down to one man’s vote, but due to a technical glitch, his vote is lost on election day and he gets to cast it again ten days later, meaning that both candidates spend those ten days doing everything humanly possible to persuade him to pick them, which is a pretty good concept — and I’m something of a politics junkie, so it sounded like it’s right up my alley. Besides, I like Kevin Costner. (So sue me; he has an amiable presence, and he’s actually a better actor than most people give him credit for being. Besides, he’s made a bunch of really good movies, like The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Tin Cup, and plenty of others.) But anyway, back to Swing Vote and my half-formed plans to see it. Luckily for me, Bill Martell took the bullet so I don’t have to.

Here are an excerpt of the post in which he explains how Kevin Costner has put another nail in the coffin of his career, but you should really read the whole thing. (It starts off talking about the recent earthquake out in L.A.; the movie section comes after that.)

One man will decide the fate of the free world.

And that man is Joe 6 Pack. His name is even product placement - Bud. The problem is, they make fun of him - the movie ridicules him and turns him into a complete idiot… even though he’s our lead. Our identification character. He’s a complete idiot, he lives in a trailer park, he works in an egg factory (but the movie doesn’t really get into egg processing at all - it’s like nobody did any research) and is constantly drunk. This is what they think of the average American voter… Thanks!

Now, there are things they could do to make Bud likable - but they don’t do any of them. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to do the opposite - to make him even more of an unlikable, impossible to identify with idiot. They could have made him really really funny - kind of the Adam Sandler method (though Sandler isn’t that funny) - but all of the jokes are on Bud - we’re laughing at him, not with him… except we aren’t laughing at him, either. He’s an idiot - you wonder what *Costner* was thinking. They could have had things happen to him that earn our sympathy - but when he loses his job at the egg factory it’s because he was stumble-bum drunk on the job and knocked over a whole pallet of eggs - right in front of the security camera. Nothing sympathetic at all.

Now, bear with me a moment for what might seem like a bit of a digression.

A few days ago, I watched A Face in the Crowd at the urging of a close friend who’d rented it from Netflix. It’s a very good movie (written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan) about a charismatic hobo who gets turned into an overnight media sensation and quickly takes advantage of the situation to become one of America’s biggest and most powerful celebrities, and Andy Griffith surprised the ever-living crap out of me by delivering an astoundingly good performance, but after I finished it, I commented to my friend that as good as it was, I didn’t think the movie was completely successful because the lead character just wasn’t sympathetic enough for me to really care what happened to him.

Her response was that There Will Be Blood proves that the protagonist doesn’t really have to be likeable for a film to work. (She knows it’s my favorite movie of 2007 even though she doesn’t like it quite as much as I do.) Paul Thomas Anderson, though, took care to make Daniel Plainview powerfully sympathetic in Blood despite his many tragic flaws by giving him a son he clearly loved, and as the story unfolded and the worse angels of Plainview’s nature threatened to get the better of him, I was rooting for him to hold onto his love for his son and become a better person with every fiber of my being. Giving a bad character (or even one who’s just morally conflicted) someone to love is just one of the many techniques available that can very effectively make audience members emotionally invest in him even when he seems quite unsympathetic on the surface, and Paul Thomas Anderson pulled it off handily.

I think Andy Griffith’s character in A Face in the Crowd was supposed to start off as a likable country-bumpkin everyman who only gets corrupted when the media and rich power brokers get hold of him, and that does work up to a point because of Griffith’s superb performance, but the problem is that the character he plays was actually pretty much dishonest and corrupt right from the beginning, and just for in case anyone had any doubts on that point, one of the supporting characters, Mel Miller (played by the great Walter Matthau) actually says so near the end of the movie. Not a good idea when you’re trying to make a tragic drama about the malevolent influence of money and the media on otherwise innocent Americans.

Anyway, once again, back to Swing Vote. Apparently, the filmmakers did an even worse job of making Kevin Costner’s character sympathetic than Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan did with Andy Griffith’s, which is kind of ironic given that Kevin Costner came much closer to getting it right in another movie he produced, Mr. Brooks, which is actually about a much more overtly unsympathetic character, a serial killer! Too bad, but hey, at least I get to save twelve bucks and wait for it to show up on cable. Thanks, Bill!