Difficult film

I just saw "Recount" and found it rather tough going. Not that it is a bad film, but the subject matter is inherently thick. It comes down to two similar problems:

First, there's too many characters. It's tough to keep track of who everyone is. In addition, many of the characters have similar titles and positions: "Lawyer for One Side" or the other, "Chairman of Some Branch", "Judge This N. That", and nine Supreme Court justices. Unless you study or specialize in governmental minutia you can't keep up.

Second, the legal issues being discussed are not "meaty" but are the bones of structure and procedure. It's all "Who has jurisdiction to do this act?" or "What does the law text say?" Thus 1/3 of the scenes of this movie are of guys with ties frowning at papers and books. Not the drama of a murder story.

There are good scenes dispersed throughout the film. The beginning does show nicely how the crisis began, what the problems with the punch cards are like, what "chad" are and so on. (I work in Florida and after the mess was over my store sold sample punch cards. Foreigners came in to the store and looked at the cards and asked about the problems with the election. I had to demonstrate the problems with those stupid cards a dozen times. So those scenes of Recount rang quite true. Actually if you just look at the cards you can very easily see there would be problems with them. How this escaped the notice of the Election Board...) The scene in the middle with the election supervisor being attacked by the Republicans was funny.

Did I like the film? Yes, but... It's not one that I would care to see multiple times, unless I was writing a school report on the subject. The acting was fine, the script was good, it's just the subject matter that is thorny.

-Doughdee222

"Fire me, boy!"