“There is only one ‘wrong’ here and that is losing!” shouts Sandra Bullock at a room of uncomprehending flunkies in her latest role as a political pugilist handling a tricky campaign. Brought out of an early retirement from the world of polls and focus groups, her character is “a fighter who is being given another shot at the title”. As crowds gather this weekend for the first few days of the influential Toronto film festival, the world’s critics must be wondering if Bullock’s performance in Our Brand Is Crisis could give her another shot at the best actress title.
Certainly the hard-bitten skulduggery she displays in the film, which premiered on Friday night, is nothing like the winsome antics once associated with a star formerly known to the world as Miss Congeniality. That stamp of cuteness has been replaced with a knack for political chicanery and media strategy in a film that marks the next step in Bullock’s long career at the top of the film business.
And it was tactical thinking that won the 51-year-old actress such a tough-talking role in the first place. Her lead part of spin doctor “Calamity” Jane Bodine was secured after she put out an open appeal to her industry for work that might stretch her. “About two and a half years ago I put out feelers, saying, ‘I’m not reading anything I’m excited about. Are there any male roles out there that [producers] don’t mind switching to female?’”, Bullock told Entertainment Weekly.
Her message was received loud and clear by her Gravity co-star George Clooney, who was producing a fictionalised film version of a controversial South American election campaign battle in which he had initially hoped to star. With the flipping of a few personal pronouns, the political spin doctor at the centre of the story became a woman and Clooney stepped aside.
Critics settling down in their seats at the Canadian film festival, an event often seen, in political terminology, as a “bellwether” indicator for Oscar trends, must judge whether Bullock can possibly build on her recent run of impressive performances, from her 2004 appearance as a car-jacked district attorney’s wife in Crash, to her Academy Award-winning doughty mother in The Blind Side and her stratospheric 2013 outing in Gravity. After a short period spent re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, during which Bullock has done little professionally aside from recording a voice part for the animated film Minions, she has judiciously selected her next role.
Frequently ranked the most powerful (and highly paid) actress in Hollywood, Sandy – as she is known to friends – has also held on to her credentials as “America’s sweetheart”, a label she first earned in her 1994 action role opposite Keanu Reeves in Speed and then confirmed by virtue of a succession of kooky romcoms.
“She is absolutely adored by the industry,” said Matt Mueller, editor of Screen International, from Toronto. “She has had real longevity and she really connects to audiences, whether she is in a drama or quite a broad comedy. The makers of Our Brand Is Crisis will have wanted her to lift the profile of the film for a wider audience.”
Indeed, such is the warm feeling for Bullock in America that the star’s recent personal problems have been charted hour by hour in the media. Last week we learned that she was out on a double-date with newlyweds Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux at a cosy table in her own bistro in Austin, Texas. Onlookers remarked that Bullock and her new model boyfriend, Bryan Randall, were “very handsy” with each other throughout the meal.
Seldom can celebrity gossip have been so (almost) completely well-intended. For Bullock has had a rocky ride. In 2010, just as she shot to glory once more with the success of The Blind Side, she was forced to reveal she was separating from her husband, Jesse G James, a leather-clad “motorbike mogul”. She had reportedly worked hard at becoming a reliable stepmother to his three children by a previous marriage, despite a bitter custody battle, and had only then taken the decision to adopt a new child, Louis. She told the Daily Mirror at the time: “You don’t think [heartbreak] will pass when you’re in the middle of it, but it does. I’m so lucky to have what I have. I have a beautiful child.”
After their separation, Bullock brought up her son, now five, alone and says he has become the core of her life. Speaking on television earlier this year, Bullock said: “When he’s off to college, we’ll divert my attention to something else, but right now it’s all about Lou.”
This summer the actress has been photographed out and about with Randall, who has been excitedly dubbed “another bad boy” because he has fallen foul of the law in various semi-serious ways, driving under the influence and reportedly scaring neighbours.
If anything, Bullock’s apparent taste for “difficult men” has only added to her appeal as one of a new breed of tough queens of Hollywood. Apparently indefatigable, like Cleopatra, “age cannot wither her”, or at least not as long as she keeps up all the Pilates, spinning and running. Bullock now stands tall alongside Angelina Jolie, Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore – each of them powerbrokers who are prepared to punch hard alongside, or above, A-list Hollywood men. One word from any of these women can green light or stall a film dead. Things have certainly moved on since the old complaint that, following the golden age of the studios when Joan Crawford and Bette Davis held sway, an actress had no value in Tinseltown beyond the age of 30.
Our Brand Is Crisis is directed by David Gordon Green and inspired by a 2005 documentary of the same name that followed the work of James Carville’s leading political consulting firm as it worked on Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s campaign for president of Bolivia in 2002. Carville is the former spin doctor and political pundit who was a key player in several American Democratic election campaigns, including Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory over George H W Bush, and who was featured in the acclaimed documentary The War Room a year later. Improbably, he also fell in love with Mary Matalin, his Republican opposite number, and the unlikely couple remain married. The balding Carville, sometimes referred to as “the ragin’ Cajun”, is the man who coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid”.
In the new film, which has a screenplay by the British writer Peter Straughan, Bullock’s character, a female version of Carville, has to battle with an old foe, a rival spin doctor called Pat Candy, played by Billy Bob Thornton. In 2012 Straughan shared a Bafta and was nominated for an Oscar with his late wife Bridget O’Connor for his screenplay for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and he is no newcomer to pacing an intense political drama, having adapted Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall for the BBC to general acclaim this year.
His script has deftly spun the gender of the characters around, with the bald head happily stopping, not on Bullock, but on Thornton. In the runup to the presidential race in America the appetite for political trickery and high stakes PR campaigning is probably reliably whetted by now. The film clearly hopes to follow the success of Clooney’s 2011 political feature The Ides of March and on the popularity of Armando Iannucci’s satirical television series Veep, starring Julia Louis-Drey fuss as a hapless vice-president who is soon destined to become a hapless first lady.
The lineup at Toronto also seems to be banking on a wide public interest in politics: in addition to Our Brand Is Crisis, Bryan Cranston is to star in McCarthy era drama Trumbo; Stonewall will chart the New York riots of the 1960s; Truthwill look at political reporting, as Robert Redford plays veteran anchorman Dan Rather; and Michael Moore will premiere his latest film Where to Invade Next.
Not only is Bullock’s latest one of a number of political tales testing the waters at Toronto, two of her fellow Hollywood queens are also appearing in roles that have one eye on the Oscar statuette. Cate Blanchett, already a contender for Carol, co-stars with Robert Redford in Truth and Julianne Moore performs opposite Ellen Page in the gay rights story Freeheld.
“Bullock is well placed after The Blind Side and Gravity, but, from the trailer, her film looks less likely to put her in line for an Oscar than some of her recent more dramatic parts,” said Mueller ahead of Friday’s premiere. “I suspect, despite her popularity, she may have trouble fending off Blanchett and Moore.”
Perhaps. But no one, given Bullock’s evergreen status as an audience favourite, will be writing her off.
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