Branding in Bolivia.

• Author: Morales, Ed
• Position: Our Brand Is Crisis - Movie review

Pity the forlorn figure of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Bolivian presidential candidate in 2002 and the tragic figure of Rachel Boyntons new film, Our Brand Is Crisis. He wants to be the FDR of Bolivia. He hopes to carry out an economic strategy that will privatize half of the country's national industries and create 500,000 new jobs in the process. Problem is, the average Bolivian doesn't believe in him, and he's behind in the polls.

So who's de Lozada, affectionately known as "Goni," going to call? Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum (GCS), a Washington-based consulting firm that sends James Carville, Jeremy Rosner, and Tad Devine to rescue him. They represent what Boynton feels is the quintessential American combination: "political idealism meets the profit motive." With Rosner for the most part at the helm, the D.C. dream team changes Goni's slogan from "La Solucion" (The Solution) to "Si Se Puede" (an old United Farm Workers chant that means "Yes, it can be done") and brands him as the man who can ease the country out of its economic and political crisis.

Our Brand Is Crisis has obvious resonance with The War Room, the 1993 Chris Hegedus/D. A. Pennebaker behind-the-scenes doc about the first Clinton Presidential campaign. Here, too, Carville appears, devising strategy as if he were teaching an intensive screenplay-writing seminar. But, showing some flair for local color, Boynton successfully gives the film the feel of a Hollywood thriller set in a fictitious Latin American country veering toward chaos. When a representative of GCS announces the campaign must use dirty ad tactics against Goni rival Manfred Reyes Villa, the shady mayor of Cochabamba, it feels like The Sopranos meets Syriana.

Most of the film's drama centers on Goni's image as arrogant among Bolivians who are leaning toward Reyes Villa. GCS does relentless polling and focus-group work to try to turn the tide. Goni, who was raised in the U.S. and speaks Spanish with a remarkably awkward American accent, gives the impression of a detached, if benevolent, chief executive (he previously served as Bolivian president from 1993 to 1997). We see him fretting about a meet-and-greet with the national political journalists at a swanky countryside villa. Later he is annoyed by an indigenous practice of rubbing confetti into his scalp after a campaign rally in a remote pueblo.

GCS's Rosner charges into the fray with starry-eyed Stephanopoulos-like rapture, convinced that Goni is Bolivia's...