My movie tastes are not complex. I know for sure that I don’t like straight action movies or creepy horror flicks. Chick flicks are fine, so long as they’re honest and plausible; thrillers are cool, and I’ll even indulge in the odd schmaltzy drama.

I’m pretty good at avoiding the films I know I’ll dislike. Occasionally, I’ve even liked ones I thought I wouldn’t.

Plus, Robin Williams and Christopher Walken have been good in the past. With a great premise, and a trailer full of funny stand-up clips, shouldn’t Man of the Year have been a slam-dunk?

Well, it’s not. It’s a smoking, twisted wreck of a film. It’s the first movie I’ve seriously considered walking out of. And if you don’t want spoilers, you can pass on this article. Just know this: the plot elements left out of the trailer are ones so completely absurd that concealing them is in no way a service to their moments of revelation. If you thought the trailer was funny, then seriously, watch the trailer. On loop. Don’t spend your time and money at the multiplex, just watch the trailer on loop for twenty minutes.

Discussing this film is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel; I’m normally not a person that enjoys vindictively slamming things I dislike, but midterms are in a week, so here we go.

It has its obvious genesis with the mock campaigns for Stewart-Colbert, yet somehow fails to mention online videos or blogs, instead attributing the idea to an isolated audience question and the grassroots phenomenon to some “millions of emails.” Given the wide audience movie-going America, this is forgivable oversight; it’s nothing compared to the utterly, utterly preposterous second plot of this film that is strangely (and wisely) absent from all promotional materials.

The Comedy That Would Thrill

It tries to be not just a satire, but a kind of political b-movie thriller as well. In the Man of the Year universe, Diebold is Delacroy, and the very real and very scary Diebold problems have morphed into an accidental “software glitch”, the nature of which are so ludicrous it’s almost difficult to describe. After hearing about it from a half-crazed Eleanor, Williams’ character says to Walken that he “couldn’t really understand” the bug’s details. Little wonder: according to her groundbreaking discovery, the problem was that the machine would arbitrarily favour a candidate whose name contained double letters closer to the beginning of the alphabet. Did the scriptwriter dream this up after his iPod Shuffle played Springsteen before Billy Joel twice in a row? Maybe it’s funny that it’s something completely inane, but would the company’s management be so corrupt that it sends out bands of creepy hoods to kidnap the person who discovers such an obvious, trivial, correctable, and verifiable problem?

I suppose my biggest issue with this aspect of the film is its conflict with my desire to believe that almost everyone basically tries to be a good person. Even in the midst of gargantuan corporate scandals, I feel like the perpetrators must be following some internally-consistent logic that justifies their actions to themselves. Even if the reasoning is completely opaque to the rest of us, I have to believe that it’s there. For myself, for example, I don’t wear a helmet most of the time when I ride my bike. I realise that ultimately, this is a stupid decision, but I can justify it in the short term by various fallacious arguments: inconvenience, discomfort, the relative safety of my route to school, etc.

In the end, the problem here is that the basic functionality of a voting machine is trivial… the difficult part is repelling malicious attempts to compromise it. The real-life Diebold execs are not actively denying the presence of an obvious bug, they’re putting their fingers in their ears and innocently denying the weaknesses that allow their machines to be exploited in various ways.

Such a concept was (perhaps rightly) beyond the scope of this story.

But fundamentally, there’s a problem that runs far deeper than the avalanche of script issues. The problem is with plausibility: Robin Williams is nothing at all like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

The Presidential Comedian

Robin Williams is a very funny man. His hilariously vulgar 2002 stand-up routine is comedic brilliance, and does indeed contain some informed political commentary. But no one would ever view the broadway performance and suggest Williams run for president.

Jon Stewart, on the other hand, might actually make a very good political leader. He can be as serious or as funny as he wants, but the important thing is that when he laughs at something, he’s critiquing an absurdity or problem inherent in the the thing itself, not via a joke somehow bolted onto it. He’d be funny by holding a press conference where he fires a bunch of useless bureaucrats, not by showing up in rollers.

Now, I’m certainly not a religious viewer of The Daily Show, but the clips of it that show up on Reddit and elsewhere seem consistent with this observation. Stewart would make an intelligent, likable President, whereas Williams (or his alter-ego Tom Dobbs) would basically just be a funnyman with an oversized desk. Has Stewart ever been more serious or relevant than in his 2004 takedown of Crossfire?

Mike

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