Wick's Review

Summary - Great 4.0

So big it came down to YES or NO. A national referendum on authoritarian rule, YES or NO?

NO won, a shock to Chile, many Latinos and the world. Turns out that pop was the way to nail the weasel. The weasel was General Augusto Pinochet, the strongman who had fixed the economy but crushed dissent.

What makes the story of his loss entertaining is the quintessentially contemporary way it played out.

And an adman shall lead them seemed an unlikely prophecy till it came to pass. The adman was confident that upbeat pop would carry the day – be a new morning, a fresh beginning, sweeter than a Cherry Coke.

Gael García Bernal – the Latino Pacino – plays the adman in NO, a truthy dramatization of the election. Winsomely handsome, shamelessly successful, his superficially callow campaign was nothing if not engaging, as proven by the nearby video, an actual spot from the NO campaign.

Truthy history that’s often funny and you can dance to makes NO a huge Yes for fans of political drama.

Acting - Very Good 3.5

Gael García Bernal is quietly effective as an apparently real-life adman who passively passes through life, while earning a very comfortable living making highly manipulative TV commercials. García Bernal is ideal, his understated demeanor and general winsomeness playing perfectly to type.

Alfredo Castro is also terrific as the senior partner at their ad agency. By day they collaborate on spots for microwave ovens; by night they compete as the admen on opposite sides of the national referendum. It ain’t pretty.

Film - Really Great 4.5

Don Draper does Democracy is a reasonable summary of the film. A Chilean TV adman gets involved in a seminal national election, only to sell liberation like toothpaste. Liberation as theology? Liberation as libation is more like it. This makes for entertaining and thought-provoking fare, even if it contains more than a whiff of left-wing agitprop.

Of course NO sells a left-wing message. It’s from Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, a font of Lefty Movies, even by Hollywood’s liberal standards.

Politics aside, the film humorously evokes the callow wonders of microwave ovens when they first appeared. Staring at them while they nuked a bolus of unhealthy food, waiting for the ding when the nuking was done, and then eating the too hot and none too colorful stuff they’d zapped. Ah, modernity.

Edge - Risqué 1.7

Reality - Glib 1.2

The circumstantial reality of NO rates well into glib territory based on reports that the movie dramatically overstates advertising’s primacy in the NO campaign’s success. Thus it’s just another truthy tale.

Now to the underlying reality about Chile’s transition to economic success and then to democracy. The `07 Hoover Institution article What Pinochet Did for Chile details the pros and cons of his record, summarizing thusly “The late strongman ruled harshly but left behind the most successful country in Latin America.”

Unlike Hitler, Mao or Stalin back in the day, or Castro, Assad or the Kim Jongs today, he ultimately ceded to a ballot. The three contemporary dictators – of the Left and thus Statists – won’t be leaving their countries more prosperous than when they took power, another difference from Pinochet. Syria and North Korea are not just less prosperous than before, they’re utterly devastated and may take the world with `em

Perhaps a better comparison is to the recently deceased Hugo Chavez, like Pinochet better characterized a strongman than a dictator. Had Chavez lived, would he have allowed a competitive election and yielded to its result? Unlikely. Did he leave Venezuela better off than when he took power? No, as scholar William Ratliff recently documented in The Economic Future of Venezuela.

OTOH, Chile continues to rise, in no small part due to the free market reforms Pinochet undertook, civil rights despot that he was. The fact that he bowed to the remarkable Chilean national plebiscite in 1988 allowed that to happen, a great blessing. It was also grist for the mill of NO, a great movie.

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