Swing Vote: Racist, sexist, asshole tripe

Well, Kevin Costner’s done it again.  He’s made me want to vomit all over a movie screen.  If he’s good at anything — which is up for debate — he’s good at making me feel absolutely nauseated.

sirhC/Nigel and I went to go see Swing Vote on Saturday night — it was either that or The Mummy — not a good weekend for movies — and we left the theater with scowls on our faces.  If it hadn’t been for stupid roommate shit that night, I would have written this as soon as I got home; as it is, the rage has cooled and the fire dimmed.  What you have now is ashy resentment and cold annoyance.

Not that anyone else in the country is going to see this movie, but there will be spoilers in this post.  So if you really have your heart set on wasting $7-10 of your hard-earned cash, then you should probably skip this post.  Go read about rapist Kyle Payne instead.

Starring Kevin Costner as Bud, Madeline Carroll as Molly, Paula Patton as local reporter Kate Madison, and a host of other decent actors as presidents and presidential nominees and campaign managers, Swing Vote tells the tale of what it’s like in the TOTALLY FICTIONAL WORLD where one vote really matters in a US presidential election.

The movie begins with Molly, who is about 10 and in fifth grade at a local small-town New Mexico school, waking her dad, Bud (Costner), up to take her to school.  It is apparent that Bud is an alcoholic, though he’s characterized as a jolly fellow who just likes to drink a lot of beer.  She has difficulty waking him up, and it appears that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened — he begs her to leave him alone (because she’s really just being a crazy bitch, haranguing on him like she matters, fuckin’ uppity women) and says that he’ll write her another note to excuse her from school.  Finally, he gets up — moaning and grouching — and he drives her to school.  Along the way, they have a conversation like an asshole husband and his harried but caring and on-top-of-it wife would have — like pretty much any other movie about heterosexual couples in poor towns.  Except bear in mind that Molly is TEN.

Bud: What’d you make me for lunch?

Molly: Egg salad.

Bud: Again?!

Molly: Yes, we’re on a budget.

OMG she’s ten and she’s literally being Bud’s mother and wife.  It’s so gross.  The entire first twenty minutes is dedicated to making it very, very clear that Molly is the “mature” “adult” of the house, and it ends, finally, when Bud drops Molly off at school and she reminds him to meet her at the polling place because that day is voting day and voting is very important to her. I seriously almost left in the middle of this section.

In class, Molly reads aloud an essay she wrote about the importance of voting, and the local news crew is there to report back on the cute kids and their cute ideals.  They wind up featuring Molly’s essay on the news that night.  Meanwhile, Bud gets fired from his job at the egg factory (which has apparently been hiring more and more Mexican immigrants recently, causing one of Bud’s friends to blame his discomfort and racism on “insourcing,” rather than outsourcing) for being an irresponsible, alcoholic douche and meanders over to the bar to get wasted and play pool and otherwise soak in his immature self-pity.  He sees Molly’s speech on the TV and remembers to go to the polling place, where she’s been waiting by herself for two or more hours.  Alas, he is too wasted and falls asleep in his truck outside the bar.  (Thank goodness for that, or we would have been subjected to the all too realistic excuse-making and apologism for drunk driving that generally attends such scenes.)

This mistake on Bud’s part sets up the movie’s premise: While Bud is asleep, Molly goes inside the polling place to find it relatively deserted.  While the folks who check signatures snooze, Molly decides to forge Bud’s signature, take his voting card, and go vote inside the booth.  While she’s inside, someone unplugs the electronic voting booth and plugs it back in, leaving an error code on the screen.  Molly makes a run for it, finds Bud in the truck, and drives his drunk ass back home.  SHE IS TEN NEED I REMIND YOU.

The presidential election, meanwhile, has come to a staggering halt and is ZOMG waiting on one county in New Mexico to report back (can I just say that Chris Matthews is a fucking SELLOUT?  I see him in every movie where they need a political commentator, which has been, like, every movie this year).  Of course, the county everyone’s waiting on is Bud’s county.  State officials find out about the error and find Bud at his trailer (he and Molly live in a trailer, of course, and Bud drinks Bud, so much Bud, of course) to let him know that his vote didn’t count and that he needs to recast his ballot in a timely manner — within the next ten days.  The local reporter breaks the story with her uncanny sense of events in her small town (why does her itty-bitty town have its own news station?  Questions abound), and she’s that much closer to getting a good gig and getting out of that too-small town.  Within hours, Bud and Molly’s trailer is surrounded by the press, and Bud is being courted by President Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and democratic nominee Don Greenleaf (Dennis Hopper).  You see, Bud’s vote can MAKE OR BREAK this election!  It’s come down to JUST HIS VOTE! Isn’t that WEIRD and CRAZY and RIPE WITH MOVIE POTENTIAL?

As sirhC reminded me, they typically don’t start counting all the mail-in ballots until weeks afterward; if it were really that close of a race, they might have begun counting those mail-ins in all the states, and they probably would have broken that tie with those other ballots within the ten days Bud had to make his decision.  But in Swing Vote-Land, if you don’t live in the US but are still a US citizen, your vote doesn’t count.  Also, your vote doesn’t count unless you actually enter a polling place; mail-in ballots are anti-’Merican.

The rest of the movie features frightening displays of ignorance from Bud regarding any and all issues, disgusting displays of bribery from both candidates, and overall idiotic celebrity culture reruns that we see every day on VH1 and MTV.  While Bud gets to bask in the media attention and events dripping with sarcasm in his honor, his daughter responds thoughtfully to as many letters as she can to Bud from various US citizens asking him to speak for them.  He doesn’t even consider these letters until the night before he has to vote, and he never thanks his daughter for caring about someone other than herself.  Most of the media attention is on what Bud wants in a political candidate, so they ask him about the “big” issues, homosexual marriage, immigration, and abortion.  (It’s a good thing they asked about these, because it would have been hundreds of times more painful to watch Bud construct a coherent thought about such issues as war, oil, the economy, or other such scary issues.  Wait, scratch that, no: It would have been painful to listen to the results of this movie’s writers attempting to formulate coherent thoughts for Bud to have about such scary issues.)

Bud says that he thinks people should just be allowed to do what they want when it comes to marriage and homosexuality, so the republican president puts out an ad where he claims that, if he is re-elected, he will legalize homosexual marriage in all fifty states.  This ad is just as offensive as the politics behind it, showcasing three lesbian women and four or five gay men — while the women say “I do” in normal voices, ALL the men take on this ridiculous stereotypically gay voice and swagger when they say “I do.”  Because even if you’re a gay man in the military, you talk like you’re doing a spot on What Not to Wear.  Right.  Then Bud says something that the media interpreted as pro-life, and the democratic nominee puts out an ad claiming that he will overturn Roe v. Wade if he is elected, featuring children on a playground disappearing into thin air.  So that’s excellent.  (This ad really pisses Molly off, which I think is great.  She was totally gonna vote for Greenleaf.  Too bad she’s only ten.)  And somehow, Bud legitimizes the idea of “insourcing,” prompting both candidates to take a stand against illegal immigrants from Mexico.  Luckily, this movie SUCKS, so the idea of “insourcing” likely won’t get real national attention as a legitimate idea, but if it does, blame Kevin Costner because he’s a fucking asshole.

As the voting date gets closer, Molly grows frustrated with being her father’s keeper, especially when he’s so blase about something that matters so much to her, and employs her friend (a ten-year-old black boy whose father is also an alcoholic, but too black to be the center of national media attention as well as to appear in this movie) to drive her (omg, to drive her) to her estranged mother’s apartment.  Thus begins the development of Bud into a Real Adult Human Being.  It only took ten years of living with Molly, and getting fired, and having Molly disappear, and being under national scrutiny for Bud to grow the fuck up already.  Molly finds her mother, and her mother isn’t happy to see her, and Bud shows up just in time to “save” Molly from her terrible, horrible mother (the only character to make Bud look like a decent person — probably the entire point of that scene — too bad this is so fucking unlikely to happen in real life) and drive her back home so she can help him prepare for the presidential debate the next day.  They have the debate (which we don’t get to see — there’s a lot of bailing out on the part of the writers in this movie) and Bud finally votes.  But we don’t get to see who he votes for because the movie ends there.

As I believed it would be, this movie turned out to be a conversation among white men about white men’s “problems.”  There is one woman of color, who happens to be a local (otherwise, that reporter would have been a white woman) and who happens to be conventionally beautiful (otherwise, she wouldn’t be a reporter, she’d just be another extra).  The other major female character, Molly, is blatantly characterized as a mother/wife/caretaker figure and, like mother/wife/caretaker figures before her, is then turned into the poor helpless little girl who needs to be saved by the strong male figure.  There is a brief foray into the ethical dilemmas posed by vying for the vote of just one man, but that is abandoned clumsily and thoughtlessly.

There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this movie, even if I were to approach it from a mainstream reviewer’s perspective.  It was only mildly entertaining, the music was horrible, the characterization overdone in general, the acting was really not very good (except for Madeline Carroll as Molly — she was somewhat believable), and the story was just boring.  Overall, this is a fucking shitty movie and I don’t recommend it to anyone.  If I could, I would demand my money back.  Alas.