2020 has not been a good year for political satire, at least when it comes to feature-length efforts. Admittedly, this genre has a higher degree of difficulty than most, and COVID fucking up the release schedule is likely delaying most of the good stuff while the disposable shit rises to the top, but there’s also the collective mood to account for as well. It has been a highly turbulent four years, and alongside the rising hostility across party lines, there has also been a rise in the need to vent about such things. A lot of the political cinema this year has had a heavy air of needing to get something off the filmmakers’ chests, but without the clarity needed to make it resonate when describing it to someone else. It is in this mode that Jon Stewart returns to the director’s chair with… well, I hesitate to call it the worst so far, but it is definitely the tamest, which in its own way is even worse.
It feels like decades have passed since I watched and reviewed Rosewater, but even with the distance, I get why Stewart made it, given his personal connection to the story of Maziar Bahari. Here, it feels like all the comments on the disconnect between politicians and voters, politicians and other politicians, and voter and other voters, are coming from a place of personal frustration. And it does end up saying at least a few things of note, although the pointier comments aren’t in the dialogue but in sight gags about the fringe parties involved in the mayoral election in Deerlaken, Wisconsin. With a single shot of tiki torch-wielding white dudes, and a guns’ right party retrieving their pens when a group of BLM activists approach, it manages to say more than any number of spoken lines in this thing.
It is quite disappointing to see a film tackling (or lightly nudging, as it turns out) such divisionary ideas with the cinematic equivalent of kid gloves, with everything from the commentary to the acting to the jokes feeling incredibly broad and too slight for their own good. It’s so monumentally lacking in punch, bite, or anything even resembling viscera, that a lot of it just slides right off the screen and collects in puddles on the floor. It being this lame with its humour is bad enough, as it only manages a couple of chuckles while the rest merely exists to fill up dead air, but when tethered to the attempts at political commentary, they somehow come across even lamer. The broad strokes made are so wispy, it somehow manages to entirely disregard the point of its own narrative (rural sensibilities vs. the spin factory of election campaigns), but in a way that doesn’t reveal any actual truth behind that divide or even the perception of it.
For a film with a kick-me-sign of a title, where its funniest jokes have more to do with dial-up internet than campaign finances, Jon Stewart plays everything so aggressively safe that, by film’s end, nothing has really been said that warranted the existence of the feature that is supposed to prop up those statements. As attractive as the casting is, and I’ll still give credit that it got me to laugh at all, this only serves to further a different kind of divide: The one between Jon Stewart’s TV work and his film work.
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