“What’s his motivation?”

That’s the Hollywood mantra for analyzing a character when a film is still in the larval stage and hasn’t yet cost anyone a fortune: What does he or she want?

It’s hard to conceive of a film in which more principal characters have clearer motivations than in “Recount,” Jay Roach’s smooth, if bland, choreographed account of the fevered five weeks in late 2000 when the country waited to learn whether George Bush or Al Gore would be declared President of the United States. Briefly put, almost every person in this film, which makes its premiere Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO, wants a single thing, and it is exactly the same for all of them: They want their candidate to win the election.

There are two exceptions. The first is Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), Florida’s Republican secretary of state, who wavers among wanting to win, wanting to shine in the eyes of history — whether the history is biblical or merely political in scope she doesn’t seem to be quite sure, at least as portrayed here — and wanting to look as alluring as possible every time she greets the press. She does so much wavering that the Republicans finally have to call in Mac (“the Knife”) Stipanovich (Bruce McGill), a retired operative with a taste for Latin and hardball politics, to watch over her like a guard dog.

The second exception, Warren Christopher (John Hurt), a former secretary of state under President Clinton, is the important one, since he was the man Mr. Gore dispatched to Florida to bring home the disputed election for the Democrats. (The Republicans, like Grandmasters facing off in a chess match, responded by dispatching their own former secretary of state, James Baker III, greasily impersonated by Tom Wilkinson.)

Mr. Hurt, arguably the most distinguished actor in a cast full of them, mysteriously fails to nail down more than a fleeting approximation of an American accent. More seriously, we never quite get to the bottom of this high-minded, strangely diffident negotiator. “There is no shame in placing country before party,” he says at one point. At another, he says, “We want to proceed as if this were a proper legal process, not a political street fight.”

Was Mr. Christopher simply too tired for the job he had been given (his appointment was the beginning of a street fight, albeit a lawyerly one, as he surely knew), or did he sense from the start that Mr. Gore’s attempt to recount his way to victory was futile and would damage American democracy in the eyes of the world?

This is a question Mr. Roach and his scriptwriter, Larry Strong, both of whom have backgrounds in comedy (“Meet the Parents,” “Austin Powers,” “Seinfeld,” etc.), never satisfactorily answer. Instead, Mr. Christopher simply departs midway through the film, the reason being that his daughter was sick. We aren’t told how sick she was. Did Mr. Christopher really leave out of parental concern, or was he simply washing his hands of the sordid business? Since the broad historical outlines of “Recount” are well known, the question is hardly peripheral, and the failure to attempt an answer is telling.

With Mr. Christopher gone, Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Mr. Gore’s former chief of staff, is left to take over the field, and if anyone’s ready for a street fight, he is. So is Michael Whouley (Denis Leary), the campaign’s national field director. Together, Klain and Whouley make an entertaining pair of never-say-die soldiers who can find time to debate whether or not the plural of “chad” takes an “s” (it doesn’t) while using a lot of four-letter words. The Republicans, being barely-human corporate drones, have no interest in such grammatical niceties, and just go with “chads,” though not, of course, dimpled or hanging ones.

The film tries reasonably hard to be balanced, which is to say it doesn’t appear to have been secretly written and directed by Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher; the Republican lead counsel, Ben Ginsberg (Bob Balaban) is twice permitted to state his belief that John Kennedy stole the similarly close 1960 election from Richard Nixon. But there’s no doubt that the heroes here are Democrats, even if it’s Baker who ultimately steals the show as the man who knows how to get things done. The Democrats are political junkies, passionate and idealistic, while the Republicans are smooth political operators who all look like teetotalers. Outraged Democratic protestors spontaneously fill the streets of Dade County, Fla. (Jesse Jackson is on hand, closely followed by a CNN truck), while the Republicans have to hire their own protestors and give them lessons in street theater before turning them loose.

Like the disputed election itself, “Recount” is caught between the idealism of correctly counting every single vote — or, in this case, recounting them, including those that may not have been cast at all, or cast twice, or accidentally cast for the wrong candidate, or cast after election day — and the inescapable fact that in a country of 350 million, an election is accurate only up to a point (whatever democracy is, it’s not a Rolex), and mistakes, oversights, and instances of outright corruption are bound to be legion.

In fact, voting-booth snafus happen all the time. During the hotly contested 1992 New York Democratic primary between Mr. Clinton and former California Governor Jerry Brown, for example, the latter was listed on the ballot under his official but rarely used name, “Edmund G. Brown.” It would be hard to quantify how many Brown supporters ended up pulling the lever for Mr. Clinton because few people outside of California had ever heard of “Edmund G. Brown,” and thus couldn’t find their candidate on the ballot. Did Mr. Brown whine that he’d been cheated? That the voters had been “disenfranchised”? No. He thanked his supporters, congratulated his opponent, and went to bed knowing he’d lost his chance at the nomination. That’s just a tiny bit of historical perspective, but it’s as much as you get in this entire film.

Once you reach the point at which two presidential candidates are separated by a few hundred votes, certainty over who won is a virtual impossibility, as discrepancies and errors mount at a bewildering rate and the democratic process begins to unravel. “Recount” makes this point ably, but draws the wrong conclusion — that in an ideal world, the process would have continued unraveling until the only thread left visible was imprinted with the name “Al Gore,” although you would have needed a magnifying glass to read it.

bbernhard@nysun.com