The Hater

An interesting premise, but the film falls completely flat. Dorothy never grows or becomes truly likable at any point. Unlike Doc Hollywood or My Cousin Vinny, Dorothy never really comes to respect her hometown or warm to its inhabitants. Midway through, the film also hints that the bullying of Dorothy wasn't necessarily one-sided, but it never delves any further and Dorothy doesn't reflect on any mistakes she might have made. Worse, she starts and ends the film manically spewing unfounded assertions and spouting slogans. Dorothy remains a schemer throughout the campaign, so she never moderates or compromises on her far left environmentalism nor does she manage to learn what folks on the Right think. In short, you're far better off watching a political comedy like The Campaign, where the two main characters aren't political stereotypes and neither is entirely good or entirely bad.

I get it, the beginning was very tense and the protagonist was annoyingly angry. She was supposed to be. The chemistry that the actors have with each other is excellent, and there absolutely is character development/growth for Dorothy. Dorothy does actually reflect on her mistakes and does end up listening to her R opponent, her campaign manager (R), her grandfather (R).

The basic premise of this movie is that all republicans are closet liberals. They make that point very subtly, I'll give them that. Pick a hot button topic and this movie brings it up and attempts to prove the liberal agenda is correct.

I read all the reviews and was not at all surprised to find a lot of them polarized on real world politics instead of independent film story line politics. On both sides, I might add!! I thought about adding a star for all the haters and then decided not to do that. To me, it was a 6.5. And I rounded up. I always round up.

I do not understand the name of the movie, but won't share my thoughts on it here, because, it doesn't matter.

The movie!! It was a movie about a young politico growing up and accepting her adult position in a town that she grew up in, left, and returned to even though she hated it. Once she got back, she found herself figuring out ways to help her friends and help the town keep its old town charm.

You also see that a hella lot of political animals, no matter what button or color they wear are the same as everyone else. And that no one is perfect. Just like no movie or film is perfect.

Is it a laugh out loud movie? No. Is it a quiet movie? Yes. Will you like everything about it? Absolutely no - not unless you are Joey Ally who had all the hats on during the making of it.

If you are hyper political - don't watch it. You won't like it at all. Save yourself the time.

Dorothy is a sincere and well-informed climate activist. After being arrested at a protest, she's laid off from her political writing job for a mainstream, corporate kind of Democrat. Dorothy is more authentic, passionate and overall more leftist than the people she's been working for and clearly doesn't belong in corporate mainstream politics. So...she moves back to her childhood home, a small town in Texas, because she thinks her talents are being wasted where she is. How she comes to this conclusion is a bit sketchy, BUT in reality a lot of liberal Americans with the financial ability to do so have moved to Red and "Purple" states to try to liberalize the culture there away from a Republican stranglehold. Presumably, this is Dorothy's goal.

Instead she embarks on a campaign as a faux Republican because she finds a state loophole in Texas that would allow the Dem candidate to win if she wins as a Republican and withdraws at the last second. Obviously, it's something so hair-brained that it could only be the plot of a fictional movie. Over the course of The Hater, Dorothy learns that the women in her town, at least, aren't actually homophobic, hateful or pro-life. Instead she discovers kind, genuine people who are locked into some kind of conservative nightmare who would break free from that view given half a chance.

I think there's some truth to that reasoning, especially with wives of conservative men in Red states having been pressured to vote Republican just because their husband does. The movie makes it's point, but its done in a clumsy and unrealistic way. I enjoyed the first half of the film more so than the second, especially the end.