Man of the Year (2006)

dir. Barry Levinson
Viewed on 2007-04-15
Rating: 4

(Spoilers below)

What the...? This was surprisingly and unpleasantly different from what the previews had led me to expect. Not that I had high expectations or that it's bad to be surprised, but watch the trailer. What do you expect? A comedy, right? Well, turns out the film is more political thriller than comedy. Yes, a comedian runs for President, gets elected, yada yada, ha ha, and then, post-election, the film turns into... a conspiracy thriller? Granted it's less intense than average, but huh? Whuh?

What jokes there are mostly fall flat. They aren't necessarily poorly written jokes (some are); it's more that the style of the film is cold and distant, which reduces the comedic impact. It's narrated in flashback by Christopher Walken's character, and Barry Levinson chose to film it in a documentary style, employing angles you'd use if you were a cameraman forced to film from behind other people because you're trying to minimize the intrusion on your subject. So when watching the moments of comedy, it feels like you're actually watching someone else watching it. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, something gets lost between the generations. Filming that way was obviously a conscious choice by Levinson, but a strange one, made even stranger because, despite the fact that the narration is by Walken's character, the shots aren't at all from his point of view, but from that third-person documentarian view.

The whole movie was off-kilter, though. In the first place, it's barely plausible that a Jon Stewart-type political comedian would seriously consider running for President of the United States. Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher... they all know better, and it's silly that it takes Williams' Tom Dobbs character the whole movie to figure it out. Basically, you can't be both a political commentator and a politician at the same time. Beyond that, the film's larger point is completely summed up in the final line, where Dobbs quotes the saying, "Politicians are like diapers, they should be changed often and for the same reason"--a point that I think most watchers of Stewart et al. understand (consciously or sub-consciously) by now and without having to sit through a whole movie for a reminder.

Clearly the misdirection of the trailer was a case of "How the hell do we market this movie?" And the answer was obviously: "Well it's about a comedian and Robin Williams is in it, so let's say it's a comedy!"

Yeah, um, not so much.