Premise: Major D.C. campaign operatives come to a small town to invest major resources into their mayoral campaign.
Midway through the closing credits, there's a clip of an interview Jon Stewart gets with a major political campaign chair or something. I forget the exact person or title. He goes on to succinctly explain how with the current campaign laws, Super PACs could raise an extraordinary amount of money for an election using deceptive tactics then use the money for anything they wanted. This really bothered me. Not the truth of that statement. I already knew most of that and have tempered my irritation of that over time. No, what bothered me was that in about 2 minutes, they summed up the entire point of the movie. They could've just had Rose Byrne record that exact answer, call it a short film, and I would've liked it significantly better than this movie.
(A reminder that I'm not really concerned about if I give away a twist here, because I'm digesting my own thoughts about the movie. I figure you've either seen it already or don't care that much. Besides, I'll be doing you a favor.)
It's really easy to come out of this movie saying that the big twist is what ruined it for you. The entire election was a big hoax to trick national campaigns to give the townsfolk the money they need to revitalize the small town. It was a ruse by the small townsfolk. It's a twist that's as impractical as it is patronizing. The idea that a population of 5000 could pull off a national ruse like this is ridiculous. Even if there are only a handful of principles in the act, getting no one to break or refuse to buy in is impossible. Are you telling me there's not a single reddit teen in that town who thinks everything is lame and blabs about it? I mean, a lot of what drives our new cycle is internet sleuthing to bring up any dirt on people. Remember how quickly things turned for Ken Bone? And the movie doesn't play fair about it. The movie starts with Chris Cooper delivering that speech in "real time". It doesn't come to us as a YouTube video. It's presented to the audience as authentic in its cutting and presentation. I don't like when movies don't play fair then congratulate themselves for fooling the audience at the end. Frankly, the more interesting movie to me would be from the perspective of the town trying to pull off the hoax. Making Steve Carell's character the lead character makes the audience an adversary of the storytelling.
It's also hard for me to see it all as anything but patronizing. And, I'm not stupid. I get that that's the point of the movie in a lot of ways. From the moment that the movie gives a location setter of "Rural America. Heartland, USA", I'm aware that the movie is about how coastal elites patronize the "flyover states". So, most of the movie is about Carell and Byrne patronizing the small-town people and the small-town people patronizing the D.C. invaders. By the end though, it just felt like it was all patronizing the audience. The big twist is that the audience thought it was smart enough to see that the D.C. people are phonies and that the small-town folks aren't lesser. They just move at a different pace. As an audience, I'd never dream to think that the townsfolk are sophisticated enough to understand how to fraud a Super PAC or that they'd even know the difference between a simile and a metaphor. You see, I must also be blinded by my misconceptions, so the movie must rub my nose in it at the end.
I think of it like this. Let's say I see an old lady twist her ankle walking down the street, so I go over to help her. I offer my arm and help her walk a few blocks until she gets home. If right as she gets to the door, she tells me "My ankle was fine the whole time. I didn't need any help. I can't believe you fell for that", I'm not the bad guy for thinking I was helping. That's kind of like watching this movie. I was meeting the movie at the level it was presenting itself as. I know that small towns aren't as backwards as they are presented in movies. I rolled my eyes at most of the ways this movie depicted small town life. I went with it because I'm used to movies pulling this Doc Hollywood move. So, at the end, when it turns into a gotcha on the audience, it falls incredibly flat. It's the "The doctor is a woman" of endings. Speaking of endings, I think fake end credits sequences are among my least favorite tricks in a movie. Just give me the fucking ending. It's not clever to trick the audience by using the universal indicator that a film story is complete. It's just annoying.
It doesn't help that the movie isn't very funny. Steve Carrell is in that hyper Michael Scott mode of trying to be unlikable but without balancing it with anything human or humorous. I was hoping for more Rose Byrne. That rivalry with Carrell could've been fleshed out so much more. This just wasn't very good all around. I'm starting to think Jon Stewart (who wrote and directed this) is much better responding to daily events than commenting on larger issues on a more theoretical level.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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