The Campaign Review

The Campaign is a timely movie that doesn’t take quite as much advantage of its subject matter as I would have liked. It tells the story of a Congressional race for a small district in North Carolina. On the Democratic ticket is Cam Brady (Will Ferrell), a smooth-talking career incumbent who expects to run unopposed. Opposing him is Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), a naïve nice guy who’s running mainly to impress his influential father (Brian Cox). As an indictment of the American political climate, the movie fights with the kid gloves on, but committed performances from the leads ensure at least a passably funny hour-and-a-half at the movies.

The Campaign was directed by Jay Roach, a man whose previous credits include Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies. Here, as there, his main talent lies in getting out of the way and letting his actors have a good comic go of it. As Brady, Ferrell channels a bit of George Bush and a lot of Ricky Bobby to create a character who’s appealingly sleazy if a little familiar. It’s Will Ferrell. He yells a lot and nabs a couple of laughs with his deadpan delivery. He’s not stretching himself here, but even Will Ferrell on auto-pilot is good for a chuckle or two.

Better and slightly more surprising is Galifianakis as Marty Huggins. A small-town family man, Huggins has no idea how to play the political game. He tells an utterly inconsequential story about his dogs at a campaign event. He sits in his car trying not to cry after a particularly nasty debate. Eventually, the king-making Motch (rhymes with “Koch”) brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) dispatch a high-powered campaign manager (Dylan McDermott) to whip Huggins into shape. With his effete drawl and leisurely waddle, Galifianakis turns Huggins into a reliably funny character, especially in the early stretches before the political process begins to harden him up. Later on, as Huggins battles his conscience over whether to go along with the Motch brothers’ plans, he provides the movie with the closest thing it has to a heart.

Along the way there are more than a few laughs, but to be honest there weren’t as many as I’d hoped. The script aims pretty low, with a lot of jokes about sex, violence, and the other usual suspects. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but many of them are on the uninspired side of funny. Any screenwriter hoping to squeeze a laugh out of the line “If it’s rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’” probably needs to work a little harder. As it stands, the funniest gag in the movie involves a Chinese maid forced by her wealthy Southern employer to speak like a house slave from the 1840s, and that has nothing to do with the main plot.

Considering that it’s about a political campaign, I’m also a bit disappointed that the movie is so uninterested in talking about politics. Cam Brady is a Democrat, but this fact is only mentioned briefly at the very beginning of the movie and not brought up again. The script spends a couple of lines decrying the nation’s disinterest in hearing about “the issues” but doesn’t voice an opinion on any issues itself. It introduces one candidate, introduces another, and falls quickly into a pattern in which each tries to one-up the other with increasingly hostile attack tactics. Some of them are funny. Brady’s camp, for example, produces an attack ad that blurs the line between campaign advertisement and pornography, but nothing is treated with enough subtlety to actually say anything new about partisan politics.

As satire, The Campaign is slow-pitch soft ball. It’s a Nerf ground war. As a laugh-a-minute comedy, it’s just above water. But as a vehicle for a couple of very funny people with a good amount of chemistry, it’ll do.