Category: zach galifianakis

A crude comedy takes aim at the fallen state of American politics with scattershot results.

A fitfully funny mishmash of political satire and bawdy humor, “The Campaign” is an assault on the contemporary plagues of crooked electoral financing, issue-free political debate and credulous, sensationalist media.  Alas, it mixes its most damning barbs willy-nilly with frathouse humor and softens the whole thing with saccharine Hollywood storytelling.  The result is that some surprisingly biting commentary is lost amid predictable piffle.

Will Ferrell stars as Cam Brady, a smarmy Republican congressman whose professed values contrast starkly with his actual professional and personal lives. He’s running unopposed for a fifth term, but when a sex scandal hits, his financial backers, the billionaire Motch brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow), decide to stake a darkhorse candidate against him.  They recruit Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), a well-meaning weirdo who sees the campaign as a chance to do good for his hometown. Little does he know, though, that the Motch brothers have darker plans.

The Motches, of course, are meant to be the Koch brothers, who have financially backed the Tea Party and a variety of super PACs.  But this film barely lays a finger on them; Aykroyd and Lithgow are cardboard villains with less life in them than, oh, Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy in “Trading Places” (in which Aykroyd played, more or less, the Cam Brady character).

Similarly, the various attack ads and faux pas that the two candidates engage are occasionally hilarious (Ferrell and Galifianakis haven’t so resembled actual living humans in a screen comedy in years, which helps).  But wrapping the whole thing in a sentimental ending turns it into a fraud.  “The Campaign” might have been truly -- and appropriately -- scabrous in other hands; those of the “South Park” guys or Mike Judge, say.  But director Jay Roach and writers Shawn Harwell and Chris Henchy play it safe and down the middle.  No actual political contributors or candidates need fear harm.

(A final sidenote:  a truly despicable thing occurs throughout the film, namely the repeated use of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer appearing as himself and reporting on the events of the script as if they were real.  He’s joined by others -- Chris Matthews and the “Morning Joe” gang from MSNBC, most often.  But Blitzer is supposed to be a serious journalist, not an opinion-monger.  He has no place in something like this -- or, more to the point, on the air afterwards as a trustworthy disseminator of facts.)
    
(90 min., R, multiple locations) Grade: B-minus