Missoula News

New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival

Big Sky Film: “Can Mr. Smith get to Washington Anymore?”

By Courtney Lowery, 2-12-07

Editor’s Note: “Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?” is one of NewWest.Net’s picks featured this week to help you plan for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opens Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. This film plays at the festival Monday, Feb. 19 at 6:45 p.m. Bookmark www.newwest.net/bsdff to keep tabs on the previews and coverage of the festival.

One of the first things Jeff Smith says in the documentary, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? is that even his grandmother couldn’t believe he was running for U.S. Congress.

And when you first meet Jeff Smith in the film, you’ll see his grandmother’s point.

Smith is a part-time university teacher with a slight lisp and what could be a clip-on power tie. We first see him standing outside a townhouse, yelling up to a possible voter on a balcony. “I’m running for Congress,” he exclaims as he crosses the street back to the house, looking small and hurriedly desperate.

Jeff Smith is running for retiring Rep. Dick Gephardt’s seat in Missouri with no political experience, a no-name name, a rag-tag campaign composed of newbies and volunteers and coffers to which even his family won’t contribute.

But as the film progresses, you begin to believe. You realize that his hurried desperation is unbridled enthusiasm—and it’s infectious. You watch this regular guy become a real political player, gaining with every frame on his nemesis, Russ Carnahan—the guy with the name and the coffers and the dynasty everyone says a modern candidate needs to win a race of this caliber.

Even the cynic in you gets a little teary during Smith’s last-minute speech to his volunteers and you believe, for a moment, that he can actually win this thing. 

I couldn’t help but to compare Jeff Smith’s plight with those of other underdogs we’ve watched with grassroots campaigns this year. Closest to home, I saw glimpses of Jon Tester’s campaign in the film. I saw T-shirt-clad college students with clipboards and literature to drop. I saw that inescapable excitement during the rallies—the kind where hope for the little guy (granted, in Tester’s case, that was physical bigness but political smallness) just keep feeding on itself, spreading from row of people to row of people.

Director Frank Popper crafts Smith’s story with an artful, suspenseful narrative giving viewers a rare, intimate (and hopeful) glance into modern politics. The storyline is spontaneously funny and wonderfully candid, woven together tightly in this feature-length documentary.

In 82 minutes, Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? gives concrete hope for the political underdog by showing that partisan politics aside, in America, grassroots, old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning can still mean something.

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