The Political vs. The Personal: Elijah meets Recount

ONE COMES WITH a chad, the other a feather. Both make their points with grace and a little humor. And both are richer viewing experiences for knowing the context which follows.

Canadians have a rare viewing choice this weekend. Two movies about politics. It's a measure of how colonized our culture truly is that the homegrown story might seem the less familiar.

First, then, to RECOUNT (TMN/MOVIE CENTRAL, Sunday) a classy HBO Films retelling of the debacle that ensued in Florida after the botched 2000 Presidential Election. With star studded performances from Kevin Spacey, John Hurt, and Denis Leary, clearly this is the film that's got the higher pedigree.

All the queasy ins-and-outs of that election (doesn't it seem 1000 years ago?) are here...Gore turning the limo around, the first hint that thousands of elderly voters in Florida mistakenly pulled a lever for Pat Buchanan, the Bush/Cheney bully boys airlifted in to play the part of "activists."

What's interesting about this film is its authenticity in all the public details. The State of Florida has something called "the Sunshine Law" which forces an incredible degree of openness on the government there (Florida may leave a bad taste in your mouth for what happened there in 2000, but this law is exemplary, a model of its kind.) so the filmmakers were given access to many meeting rooms, locations, and the tapes of most of the relevant meetings and committees.

But since the drama is so familiar in what played out on CNN, the film rises and falls on its postulations of what went on behind closed doors. And for the sake of verisimilitude, they largely pull it off.

First, there's Laura Dern's performance as Katherine Harris, a woman who during and after the debacle aptly proved herself to be an over-her-head wingnut thrust into something she was clearly unprepared for. Warren Christopher, the leader of the Gore legal team, is portrayed as somewhat feckless -- a man concerned with propriety and honor, not willing to go the extra mile to win it for his guy. Christopher has come out and complained about his portrayal in the film in recent days, but I have to say that he comes off as honorable -- but too concerned with history. The rules of dramatic convention kind of demand a price from Christopher -- he did leave halfway through the process (a sick daughter) and he also lost.

The great thing about the film -- and Danny Strong's capable screenplay, is that it manages to portray the leader of the Bush team, James Baker III (Tom Wilkinson) as likable, affable, and even in a way, principled, even as he outmaneuvers the Gore team and perpetrates one of the most awful miscarriages of the popular will in American history. "We're in a street fight for the Presidency," is Baker's first piece of advice. And from the get-go, you have the sense that this is an essential truth about Republican politics for the last several years. You've heard it before -- it's pure Rove: all that matters is the win. As a primer and a caution, Dems should watch this film, and watch the likable Republicans clean their clock once more.

The outrages are too painful to recount, but they're here: the African Americans stricken from the voter rolls, the uncounted votes, the mealy mouthed Supreme Court decision that handed the Presidency to Bush but sidestepped making precedent...the whole sordid mess. And lurking in the background is your knowledge that once the fight was over, the tough but pragmatic Republicans like Baker, they were shoved immediately aside so we could get Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the fantasy of the neocons. The pain may have cooled, but the most searing thing about election's dark comic take on the whole 2000 thing is this:

The punchline, seven years later, is 4000 dead American boys, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, a wrecked economy, and oil at 130 dollars a barrel.

Street fights never end well.

What a delight, then, to take in ELIJAH. (CTV, Sunday) It's a retelling of an important footnote in Canadian history, when a single MLA from Manitoba, Elijah Harper, used parliamentary procedure to scuttle the Meech Lake Accord, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's attempt to broker a Constitutional Deal with Quebec.

Harper is a shy figure, the first treaty Indian ever to serve as an elected MLA in Canada. We see his early life, kidnapped and forced into residential schools. The POV and narration is darkly comic, with captions from the Indian Point of view.

A delicious early scene shows Harper's political philosophy forming when he wanders into a presentation on the Indian "White Paper" being presented by a young Indian Affairs Minister from the Trudeau Government. The man's name is never said, but from the moment he opens his mout' an you here dat voice, you know who you're listening to.

The film is full of deft touches like that -- and it gets points for explaining some complicated constitutional concepts through the use of inventive Python-esque animations. There's a bit of mawkishness in the middle, but the performance of Billy Merasty as Harper and the fierce Glen Gould as Phil Fontaine carry you through.

Like in Recount, the big pols are mostly seen as figures on the TV screen, which adds to the realism. And it's in the human moments as Harper's refusal to budge ticks the days toward ratification away, where you really get to see the nut of the story. The sense is strongly put across that the impasse might have been solved, if only Mulroney came to meet the natives. Mulroney says he can't because he has to meet Nelson Mandela. You think that's a flourish too far for the script -- no way, no way could that have happened without anyone seeing the irony in the situation and the parallels with the Native struggle...

...and then they show the footage of Mulroney and Mandela on the tarmac.

Ultimately, we know that Canada didn't break apart -- and what's more, Harper's actions finally got Native issues onto the front burner. The quiet man with a feather and the word 'no,' accomplished more than a team of democrats counting undervotes and dimpled chads ever could. Harper makes a cameo near the end of the film that's unbearably moving.

It's nice to have a guy named Harper in a Canadian story who you can actually be proud of...anyway, if you've gotta pick one film, I'd say go with Elijah. It's well told. Screenwriter Blake Corbet and Director Paul Unwin pull off a dynamic story far better than many of CTV's recent real life films. I've been hot and cold on this CTV Programming stream, but when they put out a film like this, you have to give them props. It's relevant, it's Canadian, and it's interesting as hell.