Jon Stewart is a smart man, but his Irresistible (2020) is not a smart movie. The critical drubbing it received is justified. A political comedy, it revolves around a swinish Democratic consultant, Gary (Steve Carell), who tries to manage a military veteran/farmer, Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), into a Democratic mayoral victory in a small Wisconsin town. Another (D.C.) consultant, Faith (Rose Byrne), strives for the defeat of Hastings.

Stewart, director and writer here, has made Faith a Republican hypocrite. She speaks obscenities, as does Gary, and has contempt for small town America. She is neither believable nor as interesting as she should be. What is worse is that we already know, emphatically and forever, that political campaigns and low tricks go hand in hand. Why such a message from Stewart? It’s because his film is naive and hollow, which explains his creation of a scene in which Hastings delivers a speech to New York Dem donors (!) and says not a word about what is most important in politics—policy. Yet the donors are impressed.

Nothing wrong with the acting, though. Carell is nigh brilliant and Cooper is pleasantly authentic. Byrne is as poised and flavorous as Lea Massari. But, although non-partisan, the movie they’re in is preposterous. Unfunny too.

Dean Martin and Ann-Margret.

Together they are very winning, albeit Ann-Margret on her own is winning enough. In Murderers’ Row (1966) she does all she can with a cardboard part (which is a lot) and has never looked more drop-dead gorgeous. But of course Martin is handsome, and he gets all the funny one-liners in this seriocomic secret-agent pic which practically drops the “serio” for the comic. Also, unlike in The Wrecking Crew, he does okay as Matt Helm.

An example of the humor: In Cote d’Azur, Helm pleads with French police not to shoot at his moving car because an innocent girl passenger (Ann-Margret) is riding with him. After the police shoot anyway, Helm murmurs, “That’s the French for you. They don’t think any girl is innocent.”

Directed by Henry Levin, the movie is dopey but also pleasurable. Before she appeared in Downhill Racer, beautiful Camilla Sparv was in Row, but has pronouncedly little to do. Karl Malden is an intriguing villain. To sum it up, it’s nice to have Martin at the Helm here as well as all the other beguiling performers.

(All the reviews are by Earl Dean)

The chief person in “Sail Shining in White,” by Mark Helprin, is an old man of the sea—he is 82—who knows “[a]s if by some magic” that a ferocious storm is coming.

Saying yes to one’s own destruction (engineered by nature), as the old man does, is the subject. Aboard a boat, he knows he cannot survive the storm. There is no capriciousness here, however. The old man seeks an epiphany. He wishes “to see in nature some clue to the mystery to come [death] and the mysteries he would be leaving behind.” What can nature—or nature’s God—do for us? Helprin, I should mention, takes God seriously (“On the sea the only law was God’s law”).

“Sail” does not ignore the Wound in the human condition, but it is a defiantly positive short story. And there is nearly a politesse in its intelligent prose.