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Monday, October 1, 2012

Mockumentary Pulls In Real Players

A Mockumentary Pulls In Real Players


Jane Edith Wilson, an actress, was able to convince politicians like Mitt Romney during the Republican presidential primaries that she was a conservative worried about the direction of the country.

TORONTO — During the Jan. 3 broadcast of ABC’s “World News Tonight” Diane Sawyer introduced a heartbreaking segment from the Iowa caucus, featuring a distraught voter being consoled by Mitt Romney. “Save the small families of America,” she begged through tears, as Mr. Romney hugged her and promised he would.


The actress Jane Edith Wilson with Michele Bachmann in 2011
 
As audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival recently discovered, that was no conservative Christian in Mr. Romney’s arms. It was the actress Jane Edith Wilson, star of “Janeane From Des Moines,” which might be called a mockumentary but which features a rather prestigious lineup of supporting players, including Mr. Romney, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. They were running in this year’s Republican primaries as “Janeane” went shopping for a candidate to support.

ABC was certainly not the only news organization taken in by Ms. Wilson’s performance, nor Mr. Romney the only politician. As Juana Summers of Politico reported during a campaign stop by Mrs. Bachmann, “Janeane Wilson, 47, who drove from near Waukee, Iowa, to see Bachmann got more than 10 minutes with the presidential candidate but finished still unsure.” Kathie Obradovich, a political columnist for The Des Moines Register, blogged about Janeane and her indecision about whether to vote for Mr. Santorum, Mrs. Bachmann or Mr. Perry.

ABC News and Ms. Summers declined to comment, as did the Romney and Bachmann campaigns. But Ms. Obradovich was good-natured about the ruse. “I do remember there was a camera hovering over her, but as far as I remember, I don’t think she went out of the way to get my attention,” she said, adding with a laugh, “When I interview people, I don’t usually ask for a driver’s license.”

The license would have said that Ms. Wilson is 48, has red hair and lives in Los Angeles. What it wouldn’t say is that she has appeared on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “ER,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Seinfeld,” and can currently be seen in commercials for Tide and Hyundai. Until she became a mother, she was a regular on the Los Angeles stand-up comedy circuit.

She met the filmmaker Grace Lee during the making of Ms. Lee’s tongue-in-cheek “American Zombie” (2007), and they reconnected while attending a seminar on the crowd-funding of documentaries. Ms. Wilson had wanted to make a film about the Christian left (she is a socially progressive Episcopalian). Ms. Lee had another notion.
“I knew she was a great actress, and a great improviser,” Ms. Lee said. “We were talking about politics and Iowa; she comes from Iowa originally. And I thought this would be a more interesting approach to these topics.”

The topics include the Obama health care plan, Planned Parenthood and gay marriage, all of which the fictional Janeane fiercely opposes, until her husband, Fred (Michael Oosterom), loses his health insurance, she receives a diagnosis of breast cancer, and Fred turns out to be gay.  
As schematic as the plotline may be, Ms. Wilson’s stealth performance as the frumpy, frazzled Janeane seems singular, and exhausting: not only did she have to bulldog her way to the front of the press corps to get close to the candidates, she also had to stay in character even when the camera was elsewhere.

“It was an elongated improv, for hours on end,” she said. When she was waiting to meet the candidates, she was improvising with strangers. “Iowans are friendly, and you have to be friendly too,” Ms. Wilson said. “I like to think I’m a friendly person. And I don’t have contempt for Tea Party patriots or people who are very conservative or different from me ideologically.”

She never abandoned the masquerade, not in Iowa. Which was occasionally frustrating. “When I was at a Santorum event, a woman told me this harrowing story about all these emergency room visits she’d been through and how she owed $20,000 and how she’s going to pay it off on an installment plan,” Ms. Wilson said. “And then she immediately says how much she hates Obamacare and how much she loves Santorum and hopes he wins. And there’s a part of me that wanted to say, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”

On the other side was an Iowa woman who responded to Janeane’s litany of woes by pressing her phone number on Ms. Wilson and briefing her on health care options. “She said, ‘Call me, and I’ll walk you through it,’ ” Ms. Wilson said.
Both actress and director had experience with the caucuses. In 1988 Ms. Wilson was performing stand-up to entertain volunteers in both parties, and Ms. Lee was covering them for the University of Missouri student newspaper.

“We knew it was a media circus,” said Ms. Lee, who grew up in Missouri, “and an interesting place for political theater. We were frustrated about what was going on in the election. We said, ‘What tools do we have as artists?’ We don’t have money, we don’t have Super PACs. But I know how to make a film, and she knows how to act. We thought we could combine those things and start a conversation.”
Some of the conversation has been heated. “Two guys got really mad at one of our screenings here, and one said, ‘This is the most deceitful movie I’ve ever seen,’ ” Ms. Lee said, referring to a showing at the Toronto festival. “The crowd booed them. When Jane mentioned, ‘I’m a Christian,’ one of them said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed as a Christian?’ ”

Critics’ reaction has been less fevered on the festival circuit, where the film, which will be released in New York on Oct. 12 and on several online platforms before the election. “It admirably refuses to go the predictable route of ‘punking’ the candidates for easy satire or cheap laughs,” Dennis Harvey wrote in Variety, while the entertainment Web site Toronto Film Scene said, “This film makes Michael Moore look subtle.”

Ms. Lee, whose credits include “The Grace Lee Project,” a documentary about women also named Grace Lee, said the intention was not to deceive. “I never ever say it’s a documentary,” she said, pointing out that it wasn’t showing as part of the festival’s documentary section. “I make documentaries. I think I know what they are.”

For Ms. Wilson it was a job like no other. “It’s the craziest thing I ever did in my life,” she said. “If something crazier than this comes along, I welcome it.”
Ms. Lee added, “I have some ideas.”

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