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Hugh McInerney has experience in on-screen comedy due to his involvement with Trinity Truths, a fictional news show he makes with his friends on Facebook. This experience shows in his film State of the Union not only because the pseudo-documentary is attributed to the team, but because of how genuinely funny it is.
The story centres around Kevin McNamara, who drunkenly applies to run for president of the student union, and finds himself in the incomprehensible world of student politics. His campaign team consists of the long-suffering Richard O’Dwyer, his campaign manager, Tadgh Farelly, his incompetent jingo writer, and George Plowman, reluctant Campaign Intelligence Officer and Brit. The gags that don’t land due to their overuse – playing an instrument for others badly, getting good news and trying to celebrate privately and failing – only stand out because of the genuine laughs he manages to elicit elsewhere. The way Kevin mocks his English friend simply for being English rings true to life, as does the footage of Kevin and his friends on the drink. Several times the team are filmed speaking in front of a glass door in the house they share, and I appreciated more often than not that a whole other scene was going on behind them.
Kevin’s main rivals for the presidency are Lizzie O’Rourke, the typical middle-ground candidate, and Peter Leeson, who is an aggressively left-wing candidate. I had problems with the use of both of these characters. As funny as a particular revelation about Lizzie is, I thought she was under-utilised comedically, and was strangely realistic compared to the other candidates. She feels like she should be in a film where election is played straight. Peter is an attempt at satirising the more left-wing voices in the SU, which fails not because these voices are unworthy of critique but because the idea of the Arts Block flocking behind somebody who wants to defund sports clubs didn’t ring true to me, even in the heightened reality of State of the Union. This is only partially because that’s more of a suggestion to take to the Central Societies Committee. Sol, Trinity’s version of Anonymous, who wants to abolish all fees while also establishing Trinity’s own militia, struck a balance between the two, feeling rooted in reality enough to justify their more heightened elements.
At times, the plot struggles to convince you of its plausibility, but this isn’t something you only see in student films. The scene in which Kevin, a second year, finds himself running a history tutorial in service of furthering his run for president, is a good litmus test for whether you’ll enjoy the film. If you’re the type to focus on how unlikely a premise the scene is, and how much trouble the missing TA and Kevin would get in if it did, then the film probably isn’t for you. If you can enjoy, however, Kevin trying to mine the students for policies he can present as his own by asking them to compare the Spanish Civil War to life as a Trinity student, you’ll find this an enjoyable film.
I struggled with giving this film a rating. Clearly the film is trying to be satirical, and it fails in this endeavour more than it should. But as a comedy, especially for a student film, it shines. It seems to me that a satire based around a subject he was more familiar with would be even more impressive. As unlikely as it is, watching Kevin grow as a person and his friends is a comical and compelling experience, and I’m excited to see what McInerney does next.
Keep updated with release information for State of the Union on Golden Head Productions’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/GoldenHeadProductions/. The public premiere is currently planned for November.
