In brief: One of Robin Williams’ better movies!

Written and Directed by Barry Levinson.

---CAST:
Robin Williams as Tom Dobbs
Laura Linney as Eleanor Greene
Christopher Walken
Lewis Black
Jeff Goldblum

Man of the Year should be a real crowd-pleaser when it is released, being one of the highest-scoring films ever screened by the market research company I work for. Having had the opportunity to sit in on the screening last night, I can see why. Barry Levinson (who scored previously with Robin Williams with Good Morning, Vietnam, but bombed with Toys) deftly manages to weave comedy, drama, and even suspense into a relevant political comedy-drama that is unabashedly influenced by today’s political climate without becoming preachy.

The idea of an everyman becoming a political figure/running for office is not new, but Robins puts his own signature spin (no pun intended) on the cliché by playing Tom Dobbs, a smart alecky political talk show host in the vein of Bill Maher/Jon Stewart who decides to take the advice of a woman in his studio audience and run for President as an independent. Fed up with the pretentious, special interest-beholden puppets being fostered on the public by the Democratic and Republican parties, Dobbs decides to shake up the system with his satirical, outlandish behavior, never expecting to win.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Greene (Laura Linney), a perfectionist computer techie at the Silicon Valley firm responsible for the computer voting system, finds a disturbing error in the system that could end up naming the wrong candidate as the winner. When she tries to voice the problem to the company’s CEO, he and the company’s lawyer (Jeff Goldblum, in an effective turn as a villain), shoot her down, and try to silence and discredit her.

It is in the intersection of these two plotlines that Levinson pulled it off, managing to mix a fair amount of both comedy and drama (and elements of a thriller, even, as Linney is targeted by shadowy figures in some disturbingly violent scenes), without making the film appear to suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder. Dobbs’ humor is trademark Williams, filtered for political effect, without any of the more extraneous non-sequiturs endemic to Williams’ routine. The result is jokes that are dead-on and hilarious, as when Dobbs, pondering how the health care system pays for Viagra but not eyeglasses, observes that the government apparently wants to give its citizens erections, but not allow them to see where to put them. Another quip comes near the end of the film, when Dobbs asserts that elected leaders, like diapers, must constantly be changed, and for the exact same reason. Laura Linney’s story is harrowing, as we sympathize with her idealistic attempts to warn Dobbs about the election, while her very credibility is shredded by her former employers, who chases after her, bugs her phone, drugs her, and does anything he can to prevent the truth from destroying his company’s stock.

Chistopher Walken also does his usual best as Dobbs’ optimistic, chain-smoking manager, and Lewis Black provides some nice comic relief as Dobb’s cynical TV director, worried that Dobb’s ascendancy to the Presidency will put him out of job, while still loyally working for his campaign.

The movie does not currently have a scheduled released date, but its page at imdb has the parenthetical “2000” in its title, a possible indicator.

Maybe sometime this November?

Um, that should've been 2006, not 2000.

Trailer's up. It sums up the premise, but having seen the movie, I should warn you that it gives much of the movie away. It's one of those trailers that almost acts like a recap of the movie. The only aspects of the film that it doesn't touch upon are the drama/thriller aspects of it I mentioned in my review above. If you want to see some funny Robin Williams jokes, and get a gist of the film, but avoid too much spoiling, I'd recommend watching only the first minute of the trailer, minute and a half TOPS.

Something just occurred to me (and this may be a spoiler nit): Eleanor discovers that the results of the election were skewed by the computer flaw, one that drastically affected the results based on the candidates' names. But how drastic was this? If it was extreme, then wouldn't this provoked a lot of suspicion from the media if the election results did not match their polls and surveys?

Another couple of possible nits: It's been five months since I've seen the film, but in the commercial, the Secret Service agents monitoring Dobbs while he's engaged in paintball with friends notes when he's hit, saying, "The President's" been hit. As I recall, this was before he took the Oath of Office, so it should've been the "President-elect has been hit."

Also, this may just be an oddity from the way they edited the commercials (or my memory), but in Christopher Walken, Dobbs' advisor, tells him that "More people listen to you, John Stewart, the news.." More than what? I think what he said was that more people listen to political satirists like him and Stewart than the news, a oft-repeated observation in the media. Lumping the news in with them makes no sense.