A filmmaker’s commentary defends the ill-timed political comedy Blue State
Crimes:
- Making a film with a premise so time-sensitive, it was doomed to be a dusty period piece by the time it came out: a passionate liberal blogger (Breckin Meyer) vows to move to Canada if John Kerry loses the 2004 presidential election; then he has to live up to his promise, via a road trip with mysterious drifter Anna Paquin
- Burdening Paquin with a secret so transparent, she practically wears a giant sign reading, “Please don’t ask me about the dark secret I’m hiding from everyone” in every scene.
- Indulging every lazy, glib Canadian stereotype in existence
- Trying to capture the zeitgeist with clumsy dialogue like, “I thought that blogging thing was really taking off for you, what with the election and all”
- Being even-handed only in the sense that it makes Republicans, Democrats, Canadians, and Americans all seem more or less equally insufferable
Defenders: Writer-director Marshall Lewy
Tone of commentary: Mild, affable, details-oriented. Lewy seems like an eager-to-please young man who set out to make a funny, relatable film about politics without being shrill or didactic—but failed miserably. Lewy says he tried to “toe the line between things that are real and things that are funny,” but he ended up with a film that’s neither. His need to keep repeating that the film is a comedy suggests something went wrong.
Blue State’s commentary track offers the strange, sad spectacle of an artist trying to convince himself he made the right choices and ended up with something worthwhile, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Particularly unconvincing: his defense of the film’s take on Canadians as smug, superior, heavily accented assholes as a necessary corrective to depictions of Canadians as either unfailingly polite, or quasi-Americans.