Okay, so is Swing Vote, the new father-daughter- Republican-Democrat-kinda-Capra-kinda-Recount political comedy starring Kevin Costner “one of the most surprising, politically suggestive movies to come out of Hollywood this year” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times) or is it “a formless, pastry blob of a movie … a satire with dentures” (Dana Stevens, Slate)? Or did Laura Yao get it right in the Washington Post: “The film’s not nearly as idiotic as its trailer made it seem.”

Nearly 40 years ago, soon after the 1968 election, Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg published The Real Majority, an advice book for Democrats whose premise was that the swing voter who decides presidential elections is “a 47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a machinist.”

Swing Vote takes this approach to its illogical extreme. As a result of plot machinations too elaborate and far-fetched to recite, the election between the empty-suit Republican incumbent Andrew Carrington Boone (Kelsey Grammer) and Donald Greenleaf, his lizard-like yet touchy-feely Democratic challenger (imagine Dennis Hopper portraying a Warren Christopher who hugs) comes down to a single vote that will be cast 10 days after election day by a 47-year-old (I’m guessing), laid-off poultry worker who likes to stay drunk with his buddies in Texico, New Mexico, and whose wife is, well, off somewhere. Unlike Scammon and Wattenberg’s Dayton housewife, this voter has a name: Bud Johnson.

The candidates and, more important, their chief political consultants descend on Texico, along with the entire news media. Stanley Tucci plays the Republican Martin Fox, who has never lost an election, and Nathan Lane plays the Democrat Art Crumb, who has never won one. (Crumb, Fox — get it?) Both are consequently determined to win this time at any cost, and they spend most of the 10 days before Johnson votes trying to make sense of his occasional offhand remarks and translate them into political commercials aimed at their new “target demographic”: him. When Bud, asked by a reporter if he is pro-life, says sure, life’s cool, Crumb has the heretofore left-wing Greenleaf cut an ad attacking abortion. When the president finds out Bud loves to fish the Pecos River, he tosses his pro-development policies to the wind and declares the river a national wildlife preserve. And so on.

This plot line works well enough as standard-issue political satire: Wag the Dog meets Being There. If there’s a message, it’s: “Vote? Why bother?” Unfortunately, Plot A has been stapled to Plot B, which concerns Bud and his young, civic-minded daughter and fairly shouts: “Every vote counts!” That plot is fine, too, in part because Costner and Madeline Carroll, as Bud’s daughter Molly, turn in such winning performances.

The two plots sail along side by side, each working reasonably well on its own terms until, unavoidably, the final scene brings them together in a debate that Boone and Greenleaf stage at Bud’s request, with him as the sole questioner. Actually, we never hear the debate, just Bud’s long, suddenly sober opening speech to the candidates about how seriously he now takes his civic responsibilities. But what if we did hear the debate? Everything in Plot A has led us to believe that these candidates, as mouthpieces for their managers, will say anything to win and mean none of it if they succeed.