You’d think Jon Stewart would know better.\u00a0 But then you watch Irresistible and you realize he doesn’t.\u00a0 As a director and writer, Stewart seems sadly out of his depth in this facile misguided political comedy.\u00a0 I use the term comedy loosely, since the jokes are flatter than the Wisconsin farmland where they die with a thud.\u00a0 The humor includes lots of Steve Carell leaving the frame and then — ha ha! — having to return to the frame.\u00a0 Or Carell making a lewd gesture and then — ha ha! — realizing an old lady has seen him do it.\u00a0 Or Carell just nattering haplessly.\u00a0 Is Carell doomed to play Michael Scott for the rest of his career?\u00a0 Can we please get more stuff like his canny interpretation of Donald Rumsfeld in Vice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Irresistible is the story of a small town mayoral race in rural America, Heartland, USA.\u00a0 That’s the title card.\u00a0 No joke.\u00a0 “Rural America, Heartland, USA.”\u00a0 The election captures national attention as it draws big time political operatives played by Carrel and Rose Byrne.\u00a0 Carrel’s supposedly savvy political operative routinely forgets people’s names.\u00a0 As he flies into Wisconsin to recruit a candidate, he’s reading the Wikipedia page for Wisconsin.\u00a0 These seem like the opposite of savvy, but it just goes to show how desperate Irresistible is for laughs.\u00a0 Byrne stands around looking blonde, brittle, and inanimate, presumably doing a Kellyanne Conway impression.\u00a0 Mackenzie Davis scores the most thankless role as a blushing farmer’s daughter who gets to be the voice of indignation in the third act when one of the campaigns — gasp! — dares to run a dirty attack ad.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But where Jon Stewart really disappoints, and where he should definitely know better, is in the strained political element of Irresistible.\u00a0 I’m not sure there’s a message here.\u00a0 It feels like an attempt at a sweetly optimistic political fable from the time of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.\u00a0 Why does it make a point of opening on the morning after Trump’s election?\u00a0 What is it doing here and now, in these cruel times?\u00a0 What does it have to tell us about anything contemporary, or even relevant?\u00a0 “Democrats are getting our asses kicked because guys like me don’t know how to talk to guys like you,” Carrel tells the salt-of-the-earth lily-white rural voters standing in front of the town’s boarded-up storefronts.\u00a0 You can all but feel their economic anxiety.\u00a0 It’s all so naive, glib, and sickeningly saccharine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And worst of all, at a certain point, Stewart decides he wants Irresistible to be about something else. It’s as if he realized he didn’t have a point, so he changed his mind to make the movie about that thing instead. A sudden plot twist is a weird way to deliver a pandering and sanctimonious lecture about the election process, but I’ll give it credit for one thing. It reminded me it’s time to re-watch Michael Ritchie’s brutal and timeless 1972 political procedural The Candidate. So thanks for that, Irresistible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n