Aging Disgracefully

This is an intensely irritating film because it is not very good despite a very promising premise. It opens with Monroe Cole (Gene Hackman), the newly retired President of the United States, returning to his summer home in sleepy Mooseport, Maine (he isn't going home to his former full-time residence in Baltimore because his ex-wife (the "Wicked Witch of the West Wing") got it in the divorce settlement). She wants him to sell the Mooseport residence so she can get her half of the proceeds. Cole, cruising into retirement after a wildly successful administration (he had 85% (!) approval ratings at the end), is less keen on selling (flush with lucrative speaking and book deal offers, one presumes that his resistance is mainly fueled by spite). Shortly after his arrival (with two duly sycophantic civilian assistants and several morally retarded Secret Service agents), he is approached by town elders to take on the role of mayor (the long serving local mayor had recently passed on). Cole, flush with hubris and probably somewhat attracted to the notion of a small fiefdom in some quiet corner of the world, agrees. (An added bonus is that the move would frustrate his ex-wife's legal maneuvers to sell off the estate.) However, shortly after committing his prestige to the race, Cole is disappointed to find that he is not, in fact, running unopposed: his plumber and local handyman, Handy Harrison (Ray Romano), has entered the race as well. Cole, who is a protective steward of his own reputation, fears both withdrawing (he might seem to be running from a fight) and remaining in the race (the David versus Goliath element of this setup is not lost on him). He decides to remain in the race and, as it heats up, what should have been an easy path to a cozy sinecure turns into a humiliating and crazy campaign (one which has attracted national media attention) in which Cole finds himself rapidly depleting the Elder Statesman capital that he brought with him to Mooseport. Even his financial future is placed in jeopardy (as his reputation plummets, so do the speaker fees and book advances). This is gauged in an amusing subplot in which an increasingly despondent Japanese architect is forced to progressively scale back his designs for the Cole Presidential Library from absurdly pompous and imperial beginnings. Cole eventually recognizes his enormous folly, but by then is essentially tied to a wheel of fire.

The basic setup is thus promising as a comic character study of an accomplished leader, driven more by hubris than the principals that originally guided him into public life, who falls into the nightmare of a humiliating political Waterloo largely of his own making. It is also fertile ground for a satire about modern political professionals (Rip Torn makes an appearance as an apparent send-off of Karl Rove), forged in the sophisticated and cynical world of national politics but unable to find traction in such a guileless small town (Ebert appropriately makes the analogy to a professional poker player utterly vexed by reckless amateur play). Their tactics amount to employing heavy artillery against a microbe. Even then, the Hollywood ending is obvious (as Cole emerges with a renewed sense of a better self lost long ago in the opium den of power and adulation), but with Hackman at the wheel it would nonetheless have had all of the makings of a great, great ride. Certainly, even this promising framework has elements of the ridiculous from the outset (a President gets divorced in office and finishes as strongly as Cole? Not in George Bush's America). But these are relatively benign flights of fantasy and we feel comfortable granting some degree of license.

Unfortunately, this interesting premise is almost completely derailed. First, the film insists on providing Romano equal billing. Handy's story is spectacularly uninteresting: the mild mannered local dolt who cannot recognize less than subtle hints from his long suffering girlfriend that the time has come to settle down. Cole brings a unique and interesting angle to the story, but there is nothing sufficiently compelling about Handy to match to it. However, I think that Romano fails at even this conventional character. He simply isn't funny, and takes no chances. In the scenes where he goes head to head with Hackman, the match is so lopsided that it is embarrassing. Had the film makers insisted on splitting the narrative thread between Cole and Handy (and consulted me), I might have urged them to go with someone who might take more comic chances (for instance, Will Farrell) or introduce a bit more edge (Vince Vaughn comes to mind). Second, the film makers seemed not to have understood that the real comic dynamism should have come from the Greek tragi-comedy of Cole's personal descent from lofty heights. Instead, they insist on introducing many hackneyed elements (why does every goddamn small town in a comedy have to be inhabited essentially solely by eccentrics?) that go nowhere and seem to have been included only because the inertia of Hollywood convention suggests that they should be and unnecessary physical comedy that simply does not work. For instance, the scene where Romano's Handy finally proposes (I'm giving nothing away here: it is an ending that you can see 100 miles off) is filled with several attempts at physical comedy that are awkward and pointless. They are, like many of Romano's other attempts at physical comedy, actually painful to watch. Finally, the film attempts, totally unsuccessfully, to introduce a certain comic duality between Handy and Cole. For instance, one of the funnier undercurrents of the film involves Cole's rocky relationship with an assistant (Fred Savage). After one collosal screw-up, Cole exiles Savage's character out of his line of sight. The scene is an amusing send-up of the inner court life of the Imperial Presidency (Cole's chemistry with his assistant has the same sort of out-there edginess that courses through the relationships of the hilarious Fox TV show Arrested Development). The film attempts to introduce a parallel involving Handy and his dumb assistant, but Handy simply does not have Cole's presence of imperial authority and thus cannot hold up the analogy (for that matter, the sycophantic and snotty but incompetent Beltway operator Savage is far funnier than Handy's conventionally dumb jerk off assistant). This is a terrible film because it should have been great.