If the unrememberable “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004) is remembered for anything, it’s as the last movie of the irascible, immortal Gene Hackman before he unofficially retired. Did he retire because of “Welcome to Mooseport?” That’s the theory his co-star Maura Tierney half-jokingly floated in a 2014 AV Club interview, though it’s not a theory anyone has ever been able to confirm, not that I could find, likely because of Hackman’s notorious privacy. And having now, 20 years later, finally watched Donald Petrie’s poorly reviewed comedy, I can confirm, that not only is it bad, and not only is it blah, but it is also so, so feeble. It might have been Hackman’s last movie, but it was his co-star Ray Romano’s first (non-animated division), released during the final season of his “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom. And boy, does he feel like a sitcom star transplanted to the big screen, figuratively beating a retreat in every scene, virtually shrinking before our very eyes. I kept thinking of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993) during that scene with Billy Bob Thornton’s wannabe outlaw Johnny Tyler in the street: “Oh. Johnny, I apologize,” Doc Holliday says. “I forgot you were there.” I kept forgetting Romano was there. I wonder if Hackman did too.
Hackman is Monroe Cole, “The Eagle,” not just the former President of the United States but the President of the United States with the highest approval rating in history who finds himself running for mayor in the small town of Mooseport, Maine against Romano’s local handyman Handy Harrison. Why, exactly, Handy wants to run for Mayor in the first place is never elucidated, an early sign of the milquetoast evasiveness in Tom Schulman’s screenplay, but he opts against dropping out upon discovering the divorced Cole has asked out Handy’s girlfriend of many years, Sally (Maura Tierney). She wants to get married, see, and Handy isn’t picking up the signal, which Romano plays with such inert obliviousness that it’s impossible to believe she would be with this dufus in the first place. It ruins any sense of romantic tension from the jump and the whole plot line becomes devalued further in the way it reduces Sally to nothing more than a wedge between the two men. At one point, Cole and Handy even play a game of golf to decide who gets to court her. The screenplay at least admits the insulting outmodedness of this idea, but it never grants her character any real agency, never mind identity, and you can sense Tierney’s disassociation from the role in real time.
Hackman, at least, comports himself with a believably Presidential air, and even better, effortlessly toggles between Person and Politician without letting the seams show, injecting a little vigor in a movie that otherwise has none. The media circus that descends on Mooseport is ripe for satire of how elections have metamorphosed into entertainment only to sand down every possible edge into weak sitcom punchlines while the purported conflict of the political campaign between Cole and Handy never materializes because, like, there is no political campaigning. There are no ideas expressed, no views established; for God’s sake, the screenplay doesn’t even have the guts to say whether Cole is a Democrat or a Republican. It’s tempting to label “Welcome to Mooseport” as Capra-esque given the Frank Capra-like underdog storyline, but whether they were profound, simplistic, or something in-between, Capra movies had politics. What “Welcome to Mooseport” intrinsically argues is government without politics, a fallacy so fanciful and pitiful it’s enough to make one think Alexander Hamilton’s skepticism of the will of the people was right all along.
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