Review of Man of the Year (2006) by Markb. — 02 Nov 2006

A late-night TV political comedian (Robin Williams) decides to actually run for the Presidency, apparently assuming that the public would find his pathetically toothless, Jay Leno-like barbs preferable to the platitudes and do-nothingism of his two major-party opponents.

If that's really the case, we're all in big trouble: Barry Levinson's remarkably spineless, would-be satire (which lacks even the minimum requirements to characterize it as such) not only scrupulously avoids drawing blood, it doesn't even try to nibble on any of its apparent targets.

The Republican challenger and Democratic incumbent (an old-school type who managed to gain the White House anyway, making this film a bigger fantasy than any of the Lord of the Rings series, together or seperate) aren't caricatured at all; Williams' monologues pathologically shy away from such hot-button subject matter as Iraq, abortion, the role of religion in politics or anything that really matters to either side of the spectrum.

Levinson's spinelessness has been repeatedly measured in other reviews and posts against the cogency of his supremely well-observed and still relevant 1993 faux-documentary Wag the Dog; I'd prefer to recall the script he cowrote for 1979's .

..And Justice For All, a two-hour primal shriek of agony and outrage against the inequities and ineptitudes of the American legal system that was too raw and passionate to care much about being tagged as heavy-handed; flaws and all, it was a work of courage that Levinson appears to have lost long ago.

God bless Laura Linney, who as a suspicious pollster who discovers something ominous in the vote-counting process, seems to be under the illusion that she's acting in a real movie; whenever she's on screen, particularly in two scenes when her character is in jeopardy, she almost convinces us too.

The most trenchant (if not especially original) observation that Man of the Year makes is that many potential voters get more of their news from comedians like Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert than they do from more traditional sources.

Here's an idea: why not make a movie about a Colbert-type--a liberal pretending to be a conservative--conducting a psuedo-campaign who becomes forced to decide whether to continue playing his familiar role or really say what he believes when his run for high office really catches fire? That's gotta work better than almost anything in Man of the Year.

..provided that Levinson and Williams stay far, far away from it.