Politically unmotivated

The agenda of director Jay Roach’s new movie is not to mine the finer nuances of American electoral procedures. This might come as a shock or a relief, depending whether you go into The Campaign remembering Roach as the politically minded maker of HBO’s Recount and Game Change, or you only know him from films about Fockers. Now, in a spirit of meeting halfway, his agenda is broad bipartisan spoofery.

Hence The Campaign, in which Will Ferrell plays an entrenched North Carolina congressman challenged by an unlikely opponent in the form of Zach Galifianakis. Unlikeliness, of course, used to be the Galifianakis touch; here it’s a dull nudge, or whatever you want to call a weary reprise of the prissy oaf he played in Due Date. Meanwhile, Ferrell looks to have hauled out his old George W. Bush impression and, sensing the staleness, hosed it off with a splash of randy John Edwards. The promise being made is one of bloodless, been-there farce. Can it count on your vote?

With strings pulled by callous sibling super-funders modeled on the Koch brothers and played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, the candidates’ contest escalates from gaffe-intensive buffoonery to the brinksmanship of outrageously dirty mud-slinging. (Opening salvo: “Your momma’s like a vacuum cleaner. She sucks, she blows, and gets laid in a closet.”) The escalation is imaginative inasmuch as it somehow manages to avoid implicating the fashionable raunch of American movie comedies as a factor in the current tone of American political discourse. Mostly, though, it’s prosaic: the familiar coming off of the gloves, spun as the rolling up of the sleeves. Plus swears.

Among a clutter of real pundits tediously playing themselves, Jason Sudeikis and Dylan McDermott show up as rival campaign managers, respectively servile and shark-like. They’re fine, but also vaguely disappointing in context, like a selection of shrug-worthy running mates. Where’s the sport in that? One result of Roach’s agenda is a movie that seems to have devoted most of its energy to assembling the season’s most nonthreatening ensemble. Before long it’s a slog, quite like a real campaign at least in that sense but otherwise too sketchy a cartoon and too soft a satire, full of cheap shots at easy targets and many scattered bits of uninspired vulgarity—inspired vulgarity would be fine, and maybe even useful. There is something to be said for the burlesque possibilities of sex-tape as (positive!) campaign-ad, and punching babies instead of kissing them, but not by this movie. It’s just not savage enough, or funny enough.

Writers Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell try to re-purpose the usual election-run-up cliches as punchlines, but can’t fully forsake their pieties; Roach and his complacent stars take that cue to churn out a film whose sentimental-fizzle ending, its “heart” seems as much a cynical calculation as the politically corrosive corporate profiteering it limply sends up.

The wish that even our ugliest campaigns might end with reconciliation seems blameless enough, and it’s a wish that only the movies might ever be able to fulfill. But The Campaign neither takes it seriously nor seems to think it’s very funny. All it really does, to borrow a hollow-sounding slogan, is run out of ideas. Ultimately this sort of thing seems best fallen into on cable, and eventually channel-surfed away from. Richer parodies remain available on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, as of course does the parody that writes itself, regularly, in current events.

Speaking of which, someone somewhere in America probably will think the timing of The Campaign’s release is politically motivated. Although scarcely threatening, or at all issue-driven in any real way, it does seem to have been shoved into the expected doldrums of the August dumping-ground between peak summer blockbusters and autumn’s onset of prestige pictures. At best it offers a final vacation of sorts, some recuperative last laughs before the grim home stretch of real-life campaigning carries us into November. And if the it’s-all-a-dumb-joke mindset feels neither constructive nor cathartic, it does have the dubious virtue of staying forever unserious.