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Ten years ago, Jon Stewart was considered one of the most influential people in the country, but in 2015 he quit The Daily Show to do very little other than occasionally show up on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and rant. His first movie, out the year before he left the show in 2013, was Rosewater and was fairly well received, if often considered controversial. But there’s a different sort of world now, with a very different President and another election coming down the wire.
Irresistible is written and directed by Jon Stewart, and it sure thinks it’s a biting political comedy, a comedy of errors and crazy personalities, shedding light on an oft-ignored real world problem. But in reality, the politics are muddled and problematic, the comedy sparse and overly dry, and the personalities all annoying to deal with. It is a problem in a movie when there’s no one you want to root for.
The movie starts off when big dog Democratic strategist Gary Zimmer (Steve Carell) spots a viral video about a grizzled, former Marine giving an impassioned rant in a heartland town hall meeting. The Marine is Colonel Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), and he lives on a farm with his daughter Diana (Mackenzie Davis) in a typical small Wisconsin town. The town is doing poorly, having most of its income from a military base that has been shut down and moved elsewhere, but Jack’s speech inspires Gary to paint the local man as a new type of Democratic candidate.
So he flies in a private jet out to the town to convince Jack to run for mayor on the Democratic ticket. Future of the party, etc. — but as things begin to ramp up, the opposition rears its head, led by Republican strategist Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne). The two share a mutual hatred and weird attraction, which is really an idea that’s copied from the real world and still super clichéd — yet because when the two are together, that’s when the movie is the most interesting and there’s really not enough of it.
We barely get any insight into how Faith is running her campaign, the movie sticks with Gary’s point-of-view. And although the movie eventually admits that Gary is not a good person or leader, that doesn’t make it easy (or possible) to really care about him, unless you just want the Republicans to lose, which is, I suppose, fair — Faith is portrayed even worse, after all.
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The names themselves are fairly eye-rolling — ‘Zimmer’ being clear coding towards a Jewish character, and ‘Faith’ an obvious coding of a right-wing Christian character. The people of the town get almost nothing in terms of characterization, just cogs in the machine, which feels like a point in a manner of speaking, but when we can’t remember any of their names or personalities, it makes it harder to care when they are abused.
Eventually super PACs are introduced into the story, which is actually the point of the movie, although it is a throwaway moment and one or two jokes until the very end. The later twists and turns of things feel far too apologetic and apolitical, dangerously so in a world where politics are so caustic and cause such pain to so many. It feels like Jon Stewart didn’t simply want to demonize the right-wing side, although he does, but not nearly as much as he demonizes big money and big media.
These leads are all talented actors — Steve Carell and Rose Byrne have proved their comedy bonafides a hundred times over, and they’re effortlessly charismatic when the material gives them the chance. Chris Cooper is a great actor, although his character is so passive it’s dull, and Mackenzie Davis plays a person who doesn’t feel like a real person at all. It’s a shame, because the bones of things feel like they could’ve had something great.
I don’t hate the underlying message of things, that the media makes politics worse and that unfettered spending makes politics worse still, but the movie simply doesn’t balance it all well enough — I know Jon Stewart is capable of better, hopefully he doesn’t censor things next time.
Irresistible has a running time of 1 hour 41 minutes and is rated R for adult language and adult situations.
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