Still Counting.(Recount)(Movie review)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Who won Florida? Joan Juliet Buck watches a re-creation of the 2000 election so gripping that you forget you knew the outcome.

R ecount, on HBO on May 8, is a horror movie about the 2000 presidential election starring Kevin Spacey, Laura Dern, Bob Balaban, Tom Wilkinson, and John Hurt. You may want to watch it twice, to follow the subtleties that led to 36 days in which our country, like small republics in out-of-the-way places, had no elected president. On the other hand, you may want to scream and weep and hide under the couch so as not to watch the unfolding of tiny pinpricks and intricate obstructions that ate the Florida votes. The film, by Jay Roach, plays as a terrible reliving of the late fall of 2000, and the suspense is such that you forget you know the outcome. What happened in front of our eyes without guns or soldiers was as final as a coup, as slick as a shell game, and Recount shows how laws, rulings, and a Supreme Court judgment sucked the meaning out of democracy.

This tragedy begins in Palm Beach County, with an old lady holding a stylus in the privacy of a plastic voting booth on November 7, 2000. We don't have a lot of styli lying around, so for the record a stylus is a pointy thing that voters were supposed to press into a tiny hole between two pieces of metal, to indicate whom they were voting for. Under the hole was a piece of thick beige paper; the stylus was to make a hole in it that would register as a vote. The old lady peruses a ballot. The candidates are lined up in such a way that it's not clear which hole belongs to what party. George Bush and Dick Cheney are on the left, Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster on the right, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman on the left under George and Dick.

The old lady hesitates, as if she knew that the wrong vote would crash the economy, add $4 trillion to our national debt, end American supremacy in the world, and send our youth to Iraq for no good reason. She steels herself, punches the stylus into the tiny slot, and realizes that she has just voted for Pat Buchanan.

At the Gore headquarters on Election Day, Ron Klain is fielding calls. Gore's chief of staff before he was forced out, he's returned to the campaign and will end up in charge of the recount, toe-to-toe with former Secretary of State James Baker. Klain starts off a weary loser, but Kevin Spacey's latent fury gives him a heroic dimension. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw all declare the Bush victory on election night, but the Gore campaign's Michael Whouley (Denis Leary), crammed into a tiny office with a computer, notices on an official Web site that the Bush lead is dropping. By the time the journalist Ron Fournier has called Klain to say that the Associated Press has not yet declared a winner, Whouley's been told that a voting machine has suddenly added 3,000 votes to Bush's total and turned Gore's total vote count to minus 16,000 in one county. But Al Gore has already called Bush to concede and is about to make his official concession speech; Klain scrambles to dispatch a limping, sleepless aide to prevent him. And then the nightmare begins.

The Bush staffers are led by the smug Ben Ginsberg (Bob Balaban), who's telling cozy stories as Governor Jeb Bush calls the Secretary of State and cochair of the Bush Florida campaign, Katherine Harris, to ask the central question of the last seven and half years: "Who won Florida?" Laura Dern gives her most amusing performance yet as this slow-witted babe who relies on novels about Queen Esther, a great ...