102 min | R | June 26, 2020 | Focus Features
A burned-out Democratic strategist sees a video of a plainspoken Wisconsin farmer defending immigrants and decides he is the future of the party. He hauls a flood of consultant cash into a tiny mayor’s race to prove it. The point is that this is grotesque, and the film agrees so loudly it forgets to be funny.
Gary Zimmer is a Democratic consultant adrift after a national loss. He finds his salvation in a viral clip of Jack Hastings, a retired Marine colonel and Wisconsin farmer who defends undocumented workers at a town meeting. Gary drives to Deerlaken and convinces Jack to run for mayor against the Republican incumbent. What starts as a local race becomes a national proxy war stuffed with super PAC money and cable news cameras. Jon Stewart wants the film to be about how political money turns democracy into a product. The target is real and the satire never lands a punch on it.
Steve Carell plays Gary as a creature of smug certainty who mistakes his own cynicism for wisdom. Carell finds the right note in the small moments where Gary realizes the locals see through him. Chris Cooper plays Jack with a stillness and decency that the script keeps at arm’s length. Cooper does more with a pause than the dialogue does with paragraphs. Rose Byrne plays Faith Brewster, Gary’s Republican rival, with a gleeful viciousness that gives the film its only real charge. Mackenzie Davis plays Jack’s daughter Diana as the local conscience, and the film treats her as a romantic distraction for Gary.
Jon Stewart directs and writes, and the seams between the two jobs show. He stages the Washington scenes with bright, flat television lighting that reduces everything to the cable-news look he is criticizing. The editing leans on montages of cash and attack ads to do the work the screenplay should do in scenes. Stewart writes jokes that arrive pre-explained, with characters narrating the satire as it happens. A late reveal tries to recast the whole story as a sharper trick. It lands as a lecture rather than a turn.
The film knows exactly what it hates and cannot find a way to dramatize it. Every point about consultants and donors and manufactured outrage is correct and inert. The cast keeps reaching for a comedy the script refuses to build around them. Stewart spent a career taking apart this exact machine on television with speed and bite. On film he slows down and spells it out, and the bite goes missing. The result is a satire that agrees with you and bores you at the same time.