The Campaign

The Campaign – A toothless political satire, this 2012 comedy is pleasant enough and mildly amusing.  Will Ferrell plays Cam Brady, a feckless North Carolina congressman, who has run unopposed within his District for five or six election cycles.  Two evil industrialists seeking to build Chinese factories in the District persuade a simpleton named Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis) to run against Brady.  The two candidates run spectacularly dirty campaigns, the sweet and dull-witted Huggins almost immediately corrupted by his sinister campaign manager, a factotum for the evil industrialists.  There are a series of scandals, idiotic debates, and, at last, an election that is stolen by the two industrialist, the Motch Brothers (Dan Ackrody and Jon Lithgow) – by this point, the two candidates have switched sides and the Motch boys are supporting Brady against Huggins who has shown signs of sincerity inconsistent with their Machiavellian machinations.  The film has cameos by Chris Matthews and other MSNBC stalwarts and there is plenty of foul-mouthed repartee and farcical sex.  The movie suffers from a syndrome that also afflicts films about professional sports – the real thing is so much more lurid, spectacular, and unbelievable than its fictionalization that the dramatization of the subject is wholly superfluous.  The movie is only 85 minutes long, has some clever gags, and the players are appealing.  These kinds of comedies are profoundly conservative and, in fact, always end on an uplifting and virtuous note, a denoument that every other scene and instant of the film has worked assiduously to contradict.  The good guy wins – at least in the movie – and presumably we are optimistic that honesty may ultimately prevail.  The Campaign is pretty much expendable – it’s not nearly as funny or biting as the HBO series starring Julia Louise Dreyfuss, Veep