In most instances the combination of writer/director Barry Levinson and actor Robin Williams will result in a smart, funny movie; this is certainly true of their previous collaborations, Toys and especially Good Morning, Vietnam. Going back to the same political territory he worked so well in Wag the Dog, Levinson uses the (entirely justified) controversy over electronic voting machines and the fact that Americans are getting as much of their political insight from comedy shows like The Daily Show and Letterman than straight journalism, if not more.
Man of the Year launches from the premise that Tom Dobbs (Williams), a lightly fictionalized version of Jon Stewart, takes an audience suggestion that he run for president to heart; Stewart, at least so far, has resisted the urge though we are a long way from even the 2008 primaries. Eschewing the massive spending of the major party candidates–Dobbs runs as an independent–he draws crowds and press coverage from his TV-driven name recognition.
Jack Menken (Christopher Walken, playing a good guy for a change) and Eddie Langston (Lewis Black, who of course was formerly a regular on The Daily Show, nicely tones down his normal angry guy schtick to snarkily ironic), manager and producer of his show, keep the same roles in the very modest, odd campaign but they cannot get Dobbs to use any humor, he insists on staying serious. This unsurprisingly turns off the potential voters who come out to his events until he cannot hold it in any more at the final debate, the only one Dobbs is invited to, when he ignores the groundrules to directly confront the other candidates on their obfuscation, evasion and willful use of insignificant but emotionally appealing issues.
From there the campaign goes into star mode, or at least that’s how Levinson portrays events. Meanwhile Eleanor Green (Laura Linney), a system test manager at Delacroy, the company making the new electronic voting system, uncovers a huge bug in the software. Bringing it to executive attention, she’s sloughed off with a promise of a fix but in fact there isn’t time to do it. After realizing at an election night company celebration that nothing was changed she confronts the CEO and general counsel (Jeff Goldblum), who gives her a long speech full of bullshit.
Green and Dobbs meet up, fall in love and suffer for their good hearts. I’m not sure why Levinson brings in a bit of pure thriller to climax the plot rather than leavening it with humor but that’s the weakest aspect of the movie. Otherwise it pretty much hits on all cylinders. I also wonder if the movie will give Stewart, Bill Maher, Dennis Miller and a few others second thoughts about getting into politics and Al Franken is a potential candidate for the Minnesota Senate seat occupied by Norm Coleman in 2008. One pothole most of them would hit is use of drugs when younger but Levinson has Dobbs answer it by calling it BS, just an excuse by politicians and their media friends to use irrelevant emotions to avoid dealing with real problems.
I especially like the point that Langston (Black) makes about television. TV, he says, makes everything meaningless by making both sides of issues equal. For instance, a news show will put a lunatic Holocaust denier and an eminent history professor side by side, the same amount of screen space and speaking time. After so many years of this we just tune out the details as noise, the politics as pandering.
recommended, Man of the Year is smart funny and shows how we can break through the noise.