Delayed Reaction: 537 Votes

Premise: A documentary about the direct connection between the Elian Gonzalez story and Bush's win in Florida in 2000.

 

As I say often, there are mainly two types of documentaries. I call them 'Theses' and 'Explorations'. The main difference is whether it seems like the filmmaker knew the conclusion going into the project. Explorations are investigations into a topic to see what the documentarian finds out. These are guided more by their subjects. Theses come in with a point and are structured to defend that point. I like Explorations more, because they feel like they have an open mind. Theses bother me, because I feel like they are trying to sell me something. There are good Theses though. 13th is pretty good, for example. To make a good Theses though, the argument has to be really well structured. It also needs to at least hint at challenges to its argument. I hate walking away from a documentary thinking I only heard one side of an argument.

 

537 Votes spends most of its run offering a compelling theory then whiffs toward the end and completely lost me at the very end. The idea is really interesting. The 2000 presidential election famously came down to a close race in Florida. 537 Votes poses the theory that you can trace Gore's troubles in Florida back to Cuban-American displeasure at how the Clinton administration handled the Elian Gonzalez situation. It's a smart theory. They defend it well and entertainingly. I like all the use of clips from The Daily Show and other late night shows to remind us of the temperature of the situation at the time. Once the movie moves to the election though, its work feels done. I was already convinced. Once it actually gets to the election, it becomes a story about how Republicans stole the election. That's a weird move, because it undermines the first half of the movie. If the Elian Gonzalez ordeal mobilized and anti-Democrat Cuban population, then pointing to the slim margin Bush won by makes the point beautifully. Instead, the movie argues that Republicans then stole the election. And they don't do a great job making that case anyway. It talks about the "Brooks Brother riot" and how that stopped the second recount, but it's not like Gore had taken the lead in that recount before it was stopped. The first half of the movie was very clear and persuasive, then the second half was more scattered and unfocused.

 

Finally, the very end of the movie just felt like sour grapes. I was stunned when they just threw out the idea that there probably would've been no 9/11 had Gore been elected without any further explanation. That's a bold claim that really needed to be more than a throwaway line. The documentary rather hilariously attributes every bad thing that happened in the last 20 years to Bush winning. That actually made me trust the documentary less retroactively. If it was that seriously slanted toward Gore at the end, what else did they slant earlier in the movie?

 

I thought this was a mostly entertaining and informative documentary that made some bafflingly dumb decisions at the end that discredited a lot of what came before it. This probably wasn't the best pre-election viewing for me.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend