Swing Vote

(Here’s the trailer.)

This is an “honest man in politics” movie, much like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, in which Jimmy Stewart is a naive senator who learns to make the system work for him, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, in which Gary Cooper is a good ol’ boy who outsmarts city slickers with his down-home common sense, and Dave, in which Kevin Kline, a presidential look-alike and comedic impersonator, finds himself standing in for the real thing.

Dave is perhaps the most similar to Swing Vote, in that it’s also a “little guy shouldered with great responsibility” movie. Another relevant example is Amazing Grace And Chuck, in which little-league pitcher Joshua Zuehlke (never did another movie) decides to stop playing ball until there are no more nuclear weapons on the planet, inspiring a string of professional athletes to follow suit. (Am I the only person who actually saw that movie in the theater?) Citizen Ruth places Laura Dern (playing the most oblivious and irresponsible mother imaginable) at the center of the abortion debate.

About Swing Vote itself:

At one level, this is a fantasy about what it would be like if our individual votes actually mattered in presidential elections. At another level, it’s a dark comedy about the fact that they don’t.

It also creates a reductive situation in which we can ask: Could you handle that responsibility? Even given an ideal situation in which both candidates would do or say whatever you asked, would you really know what to tell them to do or say? Or would you have to ultimately admit, before God and the whole world, that you don’t actually have the knowledge and wisdom to do the right thing?

If you watch the trailer carefully, you can see the plot laid out for you: Bud is apathetic and irresponsible, but so sincere in a salt-of-the-earth way that you can’t help but like him. After he finds out he’s the swing vote, he goes from bewildered, to irresponsible at a higher level (making the candidates indulge his whims), to deciding to vote on the basis of something arbitrary and stupid (that’s when his daughter cries), to realizing that he can use his power to do something more profound than just settle the election…he can make the candidates honest. Surely the ‘final debate’ pictured is the climax in which both politicians are compelled on camera to answer a series of simple, straightforward questions, with their answers evaluated on the basis of their honesty.

I doubt that Bud actually makes a decision one way or the other…that’s too easy, and isn’t really the point of the story. More likely, he creates a test of integrity under which one of the candidates collapses. Maybe Bud even takes an online poll after his special debate, effectively letting the citizenry as a whole decide on the outcome, now that they know who the candidates really are. That is, after all, the true ideal, the real fantasy.