Jon Stewart’s new movie replaces one elite coastal fantasy with another.

I had been warned that the new Jon Stewart movie, Irresistible, had something hidden under his sleeve. I had to. Otherwise, it was all too simple. When I started to see my detection flow blocked, protected by two factors, with my own name floating in the middle of the screen to avoid leaks or piracy, I felt a moment of confusion: had I not seen this secret yet? movie, somehow?

Finally, I discovered that what I remembered seeing must have been the trailer, when the cinemas were still open. It was just that the setup, written and directed by Stewart, was so schematic that he couldn’t feel a difference at first between that synopsis and his feature film making. A cynical city Democratic political agent (played by Steve Carell) watches a viral video of a stalwart and former Marine Wisconsin farmer (played by Chris Cooper) giving a clear but eloquent speech in defense of immigrants at a city meeting , and he decides to go make him a politician. In no time, a run for local mayor’s office in the fictional, depressed city of Deerlaken’s heart turns into a sensational media war of power fought by the national political establishment. Steve Carell yells at some cows for not organizing properly in the background of the campaign launch event. And so.

Everything was so obvious that it couldn’t be so obvious. Carell’s Gary Zimmer is too bogus to even be a credible bogus – a high-powered Democratic campaign consultant who somehow needs to take a crash course in Green Bay Packers football on his private jet ride to Wisconsin. A bit begins when you walk into a bar with a large Hofbräu sign and order out a Budweiser and a burger, unaware of the courteous courtesies of the bartender and other patrons who drink alcoholic beverages, nor do you realize that the Burger and bottle of Bud are brought from elsewhere. Perhaps Jon Stewart has personally met a political warrior who hasn’t noticed the past few decades of transformation in the beer and food culture, but it seems the director doesn’t even know what his main character would or would not want. to know.

Who is patronizing with whom here? Zimmer and her Republican nemesis / hate flirting Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne) are transparently atrocious and rude to the locals, in a way that defies even the psychological logic of broad comedy. The candidate, Colonel Jack Hastings, and his daughter, Diana (Mackenzie Davis), are wise and patient, speaking out against Zimmer’s crude and simplistic political schemes, even as Colonel Jack beats the Upper West donor class. Side with its too good … message of decency and humanity to be bought.

Part of the reason it doesn’t fit is that Stewart can’t decide his tone. Sometimes he plays like a fish comedy out of the water of a small town that seems gentle, sometimes as a more acid satire with political manners. Occasionally, the mood changes to a wildly grotesque parody: a three-quarter-coma mega-billionaire megadonor comes on the scene with his hanging body supported by a heavy mechanical exoskeleton, demanding to know if the colonel is pro-Israeli; CNN presents “the Duodecabox”, in which 12 talking heads take turns chattering over each other six at a time. It’s a 21^{S t} century update in baseball commentary booth infinitely stretched on The bare weapon. These gags seem to belong in a completely different movie, perhaps something as feverishly absurd and dangerous as the real Trump-Biden era.

But this is Jon Stewart, the comedian who refused to tell the aristocrats joke in The aristocrats. I had something else in mind to Irresistible—Not transgressive but cerebral, a plot twist to change the viewer’s expectations. As the story closes on Election Day, with satellite trucks on the streets of Deerlaken and the current mayor’s voting margin on Colonel Jack declining from two digits to decimal points to a handful of specific names, we suddenly discovered The real reason that citizens have been willing to tolerate Zimmer’s upper airs and rude elections and Bud-and-burger order: the mayoral campaign, without the knowledge of the expert political expert, is false.

In wrestling lingo, it has all been a job. Colonel Jack’s passionate speech in the viral video was written and rehearsed and fed to Zimmer by a Deerlaken mole in his office, to trick him into flying and commit to making his small town a national battlefield. While Democrats, pursued by Republicans, were trying to use the citizens of Deerlaken as a field experiment on how to win the rural Midwest, the citizens of Deerlaken were conspiring to milk the political system for millions of dollars in campaign spending and money. PAC —A cash infusion to save your ruined municipal budget.

After all the phone banking and house-to-house demographic targeting and high-impact publicity, ordinary Deerlaken people refuse to cast their ballots, allowing the two candidates to vote for themselves in a 1–1 tie. Standing stunned after the polls closed, Zimmer is forced to confront the fact that innocent and smiling faces manipulated him into acting as a kind of electoral. Truman Show, involuntarily carried by cable news networks. The virtuous young Diana, who is credited with the idea for the plan, mocks him for harboring romantic designs on her despite the fact that he is old enough to be her father. Frequent regulars at the bar, freed from the burden of touching the rubes, begin to fondly discuss the work of media theorist Neil Postman.

Who is patronizing with whom? here?

Get it? It is a sham, just as our entire political system is a sham. Look at that foolish and arrogant Zimmer, heading to a Midwest he can’t understand, just to try to take advantage of the cheap political advantage of … a white man who spoke up for immigrants? But that was just a MacGuffin, you see. Deerlaken was evidently not approving an anti-immigrant measure. It was not real politics. In actual politics, a few hours after my access to the seized stream of Irresistible Expired, President Trump announced that he was cutting almost all immigrant work visas for the rest of the year.

Yes, uncontrolled money in politics, as Stewart himself sums up as credits accumulate, is shameful and corrupting. First Daily program The host has told the United States about this for a long time, and has needed to tell it. But American politics now fully exists in the shameful and corrupt world that uncontrolled money tried to generate. And of course, without a doubt, cable news is poisonous, and the campaign consultant class is monstrous. It is also at 100 degrees in the Arctic and a pandemic is spreading out of control due to government incompetence. Under these circumstances, it’s hard to think of anything more out of touch and elitist than a political fantasy that imagines everyone in Wisconsin secretly thinking like Jon Stewart.