Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #146 Irresistible (2020)
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The ironically titled Irresistible, Jon Stewart’s second outing as a writer-director, takes place several million years ago, in the long, dark, troubling shadow of Trump’s electoral victory but it already feels like a period piece set in a time so very long ago I barely remember it.
It’s a weirdly fascinating relic of a bygone era that made me happy to have removed every reference to Trump from my book about “Weird Al” Yankovic, The Weird Accordion to Al and its extended Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity edition due to public outcry but also so that my book could not be dismissed as the work of someone bizarrely obsessed with disgraced one-term President Donald Trump.
When Trump first shows up at the very beginning of Irresistible in clips from a debate my gut instinct was that the last four years have been so surreally exhausting, dispiriting and overwhelming that I do not need to be reminded of the Trump years any time soon.
We need some time to cleanse our culture and society of the Trump contagion. How long will it take? I have no idea. Depending on how things shake out it might take longer than Trump’s actual term in office.
We’ve been through a very long, traumatic experience as a nation. We need to heal. That’s not going to happen overnight.
If you’d told me ten years ago that Jon Stewart, who got through me through the Bush years with a show I loved so much I used to watch every The Daily Show episode twice, once when it aired, and then again when my long-distance girlfriend when she would visit for the weekend, would write and direct a political satire starring his Daily Show compatriot Steve Carell set in my old home state of Wisconsin, I would have been overcome with excitement and anticipation. But a decade can be a VERY long time, particularly now, when each passing year feels like a decade of torment.
From the vantage point of 2020, W. is a lovely, cuddly grandpa and all-around nice guy whose only real crime involved being a right-wing warmonger responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children. We now pine for the relative decency of Dick Cheney and comparative kindness of Karl Rove. The monsters of yesterday are ever so preferable to those of today.
Irresistible opens with Donald Trump being elected President, a trauma that, frankly, I do not wish to be reminded of. This devastates and traumatizes protagonist Gary Zimmer (Carell) even more than most Democrats because he’s a high-powered political consultant for Hillary Clinton and, like everyone, assumed she would coast to victory.
Then one fortuitous day the James Carville-level political operative sees a video that gives him a monster political boner. It’s of what he and the film initially seem to see as a miracle on par with the Virgin Birth: Col. Jack Hastings, a widower and veteran who looks like a gun-toting, bible-thumping, right-wing Sam Elliott type but actually (and this is the crazy part) seems to care about people.
Chris Cooper plays the aforementioned renegade as dignity personified. Carell’s overjoyed political slickster enthuses that the farmer and unrepentant Jesus-lover is “Bill Clinton with impulse control, a churchgoing Bernie Sanders” as well as someone who “makes Joe the Plumber look like Dukakis in mom jeans and a fucking Easter bonnet.”
Remember Joe the Plumber? I didn’t think so.
The cynical spin doctor’s political wet dream is apparently a folksy dude who looks like a Republican and goes to church like a Republican and maintains a small personal arsenal like a Republican but can be persuaded to run for public office as a Democrat.
In search of his next grand crusade, as well as a paycheck, he travels to the small town where the retired Colonel lives and convinces him to run for Mayor. “D.C” Gary, as he is nicknamed by a local, sees the ex-Marine as a figure with boundless potential, a wild card like Sarah Palin or Barack Obama with the power to become a transformative political force.
Gary is a fish out of water in a small town that feels like a theme park version of the Midwest–Heartland Land, as it were—for reasons that are eventually revealed. It’s pure Capra-Corn/Preston Sturges-light as the cynical city slicker with a head full of big ideas for the Colonel tries to ingratiate himself with the townsfolk while raising outside money that transforms a sleepy mayoral election in the middle of nowhere into a tightly contested race with Republicans similarly pumping cash into the race to ensure the re-election of the sitting Republican mayor.
Rose Byrne costars as Faith Brewster, Gary’s rival in races big and small. She’s an amoral shark employed by the Republican National Committee who lives for the bloodsport of politics as total war.
During his distinguished tenure as host of The Daily Show nobody hit the hypocrisy and dishonesty of FOX news harder. So it’s weird to see Stewart, in filmmaker mode, throw weak jabs at Rupert Murdoch’s evil brainchild that mostly miss.
That’s true of a lot of the film’s political satire, which already feels hopelessly dated despite the movie only taking place a few years ago. The world is a much different place now than when Stewart was arguably the most talked about funnyman on television. The political sphere has become so savage and insane that Irresistible’s gentle satire can’t help but come off as a little toothless.
Wisconsin was indeed a swing state in 2020. Nothing in Irresistible can top the real-life absurdity of the fact that the Cheese State could very well have gone blue because the surviving casts of The Princess Bride and Happy Days did high-profile fundraisers for Wisconsin’s Democratic Party as a fuck you to Scott Baio primarily (even in the case of The Princess Bride, confusingly enough: people just hate that asshole) but also to keep Trump from winning America’s Dairyland.
Gary resorts to dirty tricks in his bid to get his man corrected, but (SPOILER) it turns out that Gary and Faith were getting played for suckers all along. The video that attracted Gary’s attention and excitement was carefully scripted to bring an influx of dirty political money into a race that otherwise would have exceedingly low stakes. It turns out the residents of the townsfolk were merely pretending to be rubes to manipulate big city folks who fetishize the ostensible purity and goodness of small town life for their own financial benefit.
Irresistible’s twist ending has the curious distinction of being both way too clever and not quite clever enough. The same holds true of the film itself.
Irresistible ends with the words “Money lived happily ever after…reveling in its outsized influence over American politics.”
It’s a zinger that lands with a painful thud but exemplifies the film’s unpalatable combination of old-school cynicism and earnest idealism.
Stewart may have risen to fame as a professional cynic but he is, at heart, a passionate idealist who believes powerfully in our country and its ideals. That’s why most of his public appearances post-The Daily Show have been to fight for First Responders.
That should be the most popular, bipartisan cause imaginable. Who could possibly be against properly rewarding heroes who run into burning building to save lives?
Irresistible reflects that passionate idealism as well his finely-honed cynicism even if it fundamentally fails to work as a movie.
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