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EW Review: Williams the wrong candidate for 'Man of the Year'

By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- In "Man of the Year," a late-night TV talk-show comic named Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams) runs for President of the United States and wins. This comes as a shock to Dobbs, his manager (Christopher Walken), and his head writer (Lewis Black), since the campaign was conceived as something between a publicity stunt and a theatrical protest against actual politicians who are too beholden to special-interest groups.

It's also a shock to Eleanor Green (Laura Linney), a software specialist at a giant computer company who figures out that Dobbs' win is a result of her company's own computer error, not the fair and balanced counting of votes.

Voting fraud and contested presidential elections? Been there, done that. Entertainers elected to government office? Ditto. It's the comedian-as-truth-teller angle that's fresh in this semi-satire from writer-director Barry Levinson (Wag the Dog) -- the notion that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or Jay Leno might do just as well as any real-life clown currently in office. (The half of the film that's not satiric is one-quarter clunky thriller about greedy corporate types out to prevent Eleanor from going public with the truth and one-quarter requisite attraction between bachelor candidate and fetchingly neurotic whistle-blower.)

Big spin-control problem: Robin Williams would never stand a chance, either as a presidential candidate or as a TV talk-show comic, a major drawback in a what-if scenario so self-congratulatory and smug.

There's not a moment in Man of the Year when Williams isn't straining or hectoring, not one thinly amusing, standard-issue liberal riff he throws out that earns the overenthusiastic laughter the stuff produces in everyone around him, dragged out in indulgent reaction shots. (Walken and The Daily Show's professionally cranky Black look particularly pained when called upon to chortle.)

Williams turns out to be exactly the wrong candidate for the job, a comedian singularly uninterested in letting anyone else get a word in, but with nothing to say.

Unfortunately chosen promotional clips and pics feature Williams done up in Thomas Jefferson drag. In context, the wig means nothing -- just another gag that earns no votes.

EW Grade: C-

'Infamous'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

So much for my high-minded vow to avoid comparisons to "Capote" when discussing "Infamous:" The latter's own promotional campaign recognizes that thoughts of formidable Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman will inevitably arise at any mention of a new movie about the pint-size novelist with the outsize persona who wrote "In Cold Blood." ''There's more to the story than you know,'' the Infamous ads promise, acknowledging that last year's popular, award-laden biodrama about how Capote researched and wrote his masterpiece is still vivid in the memory of those interested in this year's biodrama about how Capote researched and wrote his masterpiece.

What more do we need to know about the Clutter-family murders in Holcomb, Kansas, in the fall of 1959, the two killers who were eventually hanged for the crime, or the fish-out-of-water sight of a Southern-born, Manhattan-steeped novelist of screamingly effeminate plumage traipsing around the Midwest and changing the art of novelistic reportage forever more, at the expense of his complicated soul?

The added value that writer-director Douglas McGrath has in mind is gossip -- and a goggly interest in gossip becomes the glittering gimmick of "Infamous," as well as its undoing as a work that can measure up to the rigorous, sophisticated understatement of Bennett Miller's "Capote."

Did you know that glamorous socialite Babe Paley (Sigourney Weaver) sent the author (her favorite court jester and confidant) emergency rations of caviar? That she shipped delicacies to darkest flyover country while Capote (British stage actor Toby Jones, a physical doppelgänger with a touch of frog about the eyes) was burrowing in with the Velveeta-cheese-eating townsfolk of Holcomb and forging ties with killers Perry Smith (Daniel Craig, playing the anti-James Bond and unable to make sense of this strange gig) and Dick Hickock (Lee Pace)? Did you know that local detective Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels) fell into boyish swoons of fandom when Capote dropped the names of celebrity friends Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra? Or that the journalist and Perry shared a jailhouse kiss -- and an electric current of homosexual love, one yearning man to another?

I don't know if any of this is true, or if Mrs. Paley did teach her fellow socialite swingers to do the twist one madcap night. Truth, according to Infamous, has less to do with fact than with feeling, especially in the case of Mr. C. But I do know that McGrath invests almost all his storytelling capital in the contrast between lavishly staged scenes of vapid New York high life and a dark American melodrama of loneliness that turned one man into a killer, the other into a writer.

The filmmaker likes those conflicts clear and even charming -- a primer on early-1960s period manners both in New York nightclubs and at Kansas dinner tables, re-created with the same perkiness he brought to his delightful 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. (Emma herself, Gwyneth Paltrow, croons a number in a partytrick cameo as a nightclub singer and then disappears.) Arriving by train in Kansas, Capote and his indispensable friend Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock) stare at the flat, low skyline as if the view were an art installation of Midwesterniana. (Bullock, costumed in mousy green sweaters and sad ankle socks, keeps herself nicely muted.)

There's no stinting on set decoration and ambience; "Infamous" is, in fact, prettier than "Capote," with every visual detail more voluptuous than in last year's sparer version. Jones himself is more voluptuous in his mannerisms than Hoffman, too -- a perfectly good perf with the rotten luck to arrive second.

But that charm, flirting so cozily with satire in the New York scenes, doesn't know where to put itself in Holcomb. The newer movie (made at the same time as Capote, then put in a holding pattern until Oscar had safely left the room) revels too delightedly in both the time-capsule fame of the players and the real-life characters being played -- Peter Bogdanovich as publisher Bennett Cerf, Hope Davis as socialite Slim Keith, Isabella Rossellini as Euro society's Marella Agnelli, Bend It Like Beckham's Juliet Stevenson as Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. (The key players are also interviewed, documentary-style, their accounts differing from time to time in another demonstration of the subjectivity of truth and the irresistibility of gossip.)

Before long, the famous in Infamous have overshot the movie's modest contours -- and that's even without the fame of Capote singing like another, more haunting voice in another room.

EW Grade: B-

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