By Jim Seymour
For Variety

HOW better to salute President’s Day (on which we celebrate all the presidents, I suppose) than to snuggle up with the latest project of the unbelievably talented funnyman and perennial social critic Robin Williams, our country’s comedian laureate?
His latest incarnation supposes that a successful talk show host has been unwittingly elected president and then faces a scandal which… no, I won’t be a spoiler. Besides being an engaging comedy, the film is also, somewhat unfortunately, a thriller. Regardless, you shouldn’t miss Mr. Williams dressed as George Washington, addressing a full session of Congress. One can only dream.
When Tom Dobbs’ (Williams) manager (the lovingly sardonic Christopher Walken) mentions early in this film that the chief difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must be plausible, I began to understand the wonderfully constructed metaphor on which Barry Levinson has built his film. Man of the Year has the shear audacity to be funny, while not straining itself to be “outrageously funny,” which would undermine its clearly pointed satiric nod to the unbelievable realities we’re all living with in 2007.
Ask yourself this. In 2000, would it have been any more difficult to imagine a technical “glitch” (the likes of which are still haunting our electoral process) that leads to our electing a charismatic game show host, incredulously speaking the truth, than to imagine a world in which our country remains hopelessly ensconced in two wars in the Middle East? After all, since the winter months of 2000, when it seemed quite possible Al Gore might be president, the sanctity of presidential elections has certainly eroded. Maybe fact is stranger than fiction.
That said, director Levinson deserves credit for sticking to comedy, without overreaching, by trying to instill his film with blatant political messages. Like Chekhov, he knows that mere suggestion can ultimately carry more ammunition than overstatement.
In fact, other than Williams’ consistently irreverent and brilliantly conceived one-liners (what else would we expect?), very little partisanship is on display here. The stand-ins for the Democratic and Republican candidates in this tale of high jinks, corporate greed, and the virtues of truth-telling could hardly be described as malicious caricatures. There is no attempt to win the audience by suggesting that comedian Tom Dobbs —intelligent and thoughtful as he is—should be president.
There is, however, a deeply rooted sensibility that the American public is generally way ahead of most politicians, reared as they are on the “reality comedy” of Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert. The gap between what we’re seeing and being told has widened considerably since those innocent days of hanging chads and questionable Supreme Court decisions. Even as the film sensibly remains good-hearted entertainment, one cannot escape the suggestion that there’s a charade happening and it can’t last much longer. For this alone, the film deserves praise and, ultimately, our attention.
When the film begins to sink into more of a thriller than a comedy, we begin to sense it belies its plausibility. While every breath and move of Laura Linney as the beleaguered whistleblower is perfectly truthful, the weight of this somewhat superfluous storyline becomes an anchor that nearly sinks the boat.
Levinson might have been wiser to trim the Michael Crichton and accentuate the Will Rogers angle, but this consideration in no way means you should avoid this highly inventive and thought-provoking look at politics in the 21st century.