Written and directed by Jon Stewart, Irresistible is a comedy about what happens when a small Wisconsin town becomes the main attraction of our modern-day political circus. When the Democratic National Committee’s top strategist Gary Zimmer (Steve Carell) sees a video of retired Marine colonel Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper) standing up for the rights of his town’s undocumented workers, he believes he has found the key to winning back voters in America’s heartland.
Paying an unscheduled visit to Hastings’ dairy farm in rural Deerlaken, Wisconsin, Gary persuades the largely apolitical retired Marine to run for mayor. Initially, Gary relies on Jack’s very capable daughter, Diana (Mackenzie Davis) and a team of enthusiastic, if inexperienced, volunteers. However, when the Republican National Committee counters him by sending in his brilliant nemesis Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne), Gary is more than primed to up his game. As Gary and Faith square off, what started out as a local race quickly becomes escalates to a national political battle and a hilarious fight for the soul of America.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
With his new comedy, Irresistible, writer/director Jon Stewart brings his nimble humor and deep knowledge of American politics to the story of a small-town election that becomes a proxy battle between the national Democratic and Republican parties. As it tracks the escalating tactics of high-powered DC consultants and the resulting media carnival, Irresistible delivers a hilarious and pointed critique of America’s political system. The top-notch cast, led by Steve Carell, bring comic brio and a fundamental humanity to their characters, making for a film that is both entertaining and resonant.
In developing Irresistible, Stewart’s interest lay not in partisan politics, but in systemic factors that make today’s politics what they are. “I was thinking about how to satirize the current moment without necessarily being so specific,” he explains. “It’s like talking about climate as opposed to talking about weather. Was there something about the climate of our current political system, and the way money is incentivized within it, that creates the kind of corrupted outcomes we’ve been seeing? Rather than focusing on a Trump-like figure or a rising politician, the idea was to look at it from the system’s perspective.”
Real-world events and experiences informed the premise of Irresistible. In the spring of 2017, there was a special election in Georgia to fill a vacant congressional seat. It was the first election of the Trump era and became a huge national news story as a young first-time Democratic candidate, Jon Ossoff, emerged as a leading contender in a historically Republican district. By the time of the June runoff between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel, the race had become the most expensive in House history, with an estimated $55 million spent, according to the New York Times. It was the first election of the Trump era and as Stewart notes, “The Republican Party and the Democratic Party both looked at it as a bellwether for this new world order. So they poured millions into an off-year congressional election. And the election came and went and it was a bellwether to nothing. It basically was like walking into a strip club and making it rain.”
A subsequent experience illuminated another rising phenomenon in contemporary politics. A friend who was running for Congress in West Virginia asked him to introduce him at a fundraising event. But the event wasn’t in West Virginia – it was in the West Village, in Manhattan. Recalls Stewart, “It was just a bunch of New Yorkers and a guy running for a congressional district in a place that none of them had ever had any experience with, or heard of, or particularly cared about. But they would do their due diligence as active political people to raise money for this guy. And it just struck me as so bananas, that he would be having to waste his time and energy to raise this money.”
The pernicious role of money in politics was a frequent topic for Stewart on “The Daily Show,” and he took every opportunity to raise the issue when politicians guested on his show. One episode with Nancy Pelosi, at the time Speaker of the House, stuck
