Man of the Year, starring Robin Williams, just doesn’t work. It’s
not completely a bludgeon-your-eyes-out-type flick, but it is a lot closer to
that status than it should be, given the deliciousness of its premise and the
current state of swelling public dissatisfaction with all the dissembling,
incompetence, corruption, pork-barrel handouts, war-waging and page-fondling going
on in Washington, D.C.

The movie centers around Williams’ Tom Dobbs, a Jon
Stewart-like figure and the host of a popular cable talk show that skewers
politics and current events. Fed up with the status quo, he enters the race for
presidency against an incumbent Democrat and glad-handing Republican senator,
hoping to shake things up and generate legitimate public discourse on the real
issues. This dovetails, however, with the installation of a new touch-screen,
paperless national voting system. When said computerized structure
malfunctions, Dobbs is surprisingly elected.

Williams’ shtick of improv runs is tiresome to some folks,
but he gets loose with some true winners here in the campaign trail portion of Man of the Year, dismissing the concept
of intelligent design (“You have a waste processing plant next to a recreation
area”) and hijacking a televised debate in whirling dervish fashion that brings
a smile to your face.

Levinson shoots the picture in a floating-frame, doc-photog
style in an effort to abet this offhand manner, but this backfires and makes
the entire movie seem more casual and incidental than it should be. You need a
real groundedness to counterbalance the whimsicality of some of the free-form
plot twists here, to make the story seem concrete and remotely believable.

Anyone who’s followed politics even a little bit, though,
will find their suspension of disbelief tested on occasion by the conveniences
and contrivances of Man of the Year’s
script. Watching the film, the one thought that coursed repeatedly through my
brain was, “Why isn’t more being done with this concept?”

Despite Christopher Walken’s inherent awesomeness, material
with his physically ailing Jack Menken, Dobbs’ longtime manager, falls flat,
and Laura Linney gives as unfocused a performance as I’ve ever seen from her as
Eleanor Green, a conscientious employee of the company awarded the voting
machine contract. After her admonitions of a glitch go unheeded, she’s framed
as a drug addict by her employers in an effort to discredit her (!), so she
sidles up to Dobbs — the one man she thinks can/will believe her. Awkward, halting romance ensues along with comedically flavored socio-political intrigue.

In short, all of the voting fraud material in Man of the Year is haphazard excess, and
not something we’re made to care about. Certain scenes — including a breakdown
Eleanor has over a cappuccino — drag on for too long, and Levinson also surprisingly
makes the rookie mistake of revisiting thematic bits, like Eleanor’s confession
to Dobbs, that should be streamlined and surgically clean. All of this unfortunately
feeds a chief reading of the film as one mortally wounded by misappropriation of
time. (Universal, PG-13, 115 minutes)