Tragic comic

“The new leader of the Free World is a comedian.”

That tagline for Man of the Year is also a kind of punchline, but not a particularly funny one, and not—as it turns out—as trenchant as you might have guessed at first.

The comedian in this case is Tom Dobbs, a wise-cracking talk-show host played by Robin Williams. Dobbs’ political japes and popularity morph into a whirlwind party-of-one candidacy for the presidency—and beyond that, into an apparent election victory.

There’s more to it than that, of course, but not always in a good or satisfactory way. Alongside its satiric comedian-for-president plot, Man of the Year has an intersecting tale of bungled electronic vote-counting. A highly placed computer engineer played by Laura Linney discovers and tries to expose the erroneous vote totals, but finds herself enmeshed in a corporate cover-up of increasingly menacing proportions.

Writer-director Barry Levinson seems unable to sort through the script’s muddle of variously provocative concepts. The comedian’s candidacy strikes a comic-satiric note early on, but the voting-glitch plot gravitates increasingly toward a low-grade brand of paranoid thriller. And the half-hearted attempt to bridge the narrative gap with a gimcrack love story only makes matters worse, and even the satiric elements begin to flounder in the later portions.

The film is at its best when it’s riffing on the credulity of audiences and performers alike in the world of television. The thriller element is second-rate at best, and Linney comes off as rather over-qualified (and perhaps over-directed as well) for the part.

Williams is an interesting choice for the lead role, but he, too, gets trapped in the production’s wobblings. He may be too strong a comic performer for a role that calls for him to be, at least part of the time, a disturbingly unfunny funnyman.