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Picturing the price of government for sale

Thursday, April 22, 2010

FOR A FILM-MAKER with a muckracking story the timing could scarcely be better. Obama-backed legislation on the finance industry finally started its journey on Capitol Hill yesterday, and Washington is now awash – if that isn’t too clean a word for it – with a reported 1,500 lobbyists all trying to influence lawmakers on this one vital issue.

It’s a vast lobbying exercise, whose sizeable price-tag is becoming all too clear. Over $20 million has already been paid into election campaign chests belonging to Senators on the committee concerned (which for arcane historical reasons happens to be the Agricultural Committee - from the innocent days when “derivatives” were merely a form of futures-based lending, designed to protect farmers from harvest vagaries).

It’s against this current Congressional backdrop that Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (left) is finishing his compelling probe of the recent period when uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff (right) ruled the DC roost – but was finally exposed and went to prison for 4 years for fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe officials. Gibney’s film “CASINO JACK and the United States of Money” scored much critical approval at the Sundance Film Festival and, with about 8 minutes trimmed from it, will go on release just three weeks from now.

Employing all the modish tools favored by today’s “factual” movie-makers (which I frankly haven’t always approved of) Gilbey has amassed a driving story which, for all its multifarious tangents, manages to consistently grip the audience - or at least this member - with a horrified fascination throughout all of its surviving 122 minutes. At Sundance it was greeted as an outrageous dark comedy … and I guess it is. But then again, as with all dark comedy, you are left wondering what’s so funny, when you stop to think about it.

Think about, for instance, bilking millions from Native American tribes who wish to make money out of casino franchises for social and health projects, even while – as Abramoff was – working on the opposite side that’s creating laws to close casinos on moral grounds, and also (a gut–turning piece of insult added to injury) describing these Indian clients as “monkeys” and “troglodytes” in private correspondence. All this correspondence, by the way, displays a gleeful reveling in assumed superiority and entitlement that is simultaneously both vicious and pubescent. 

 

The now famously offensive emails between Abramoff and his closest cohort Michael Scanlon (also now incarcerated, but once the press spokesman for then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay) boggle the mind when they are read out loud - with the correct degree of lasciviousness, albeit understated - by two wonderfully deadpanning actors, Stanley Tucci and Paul Rudd. What kind of arrogant idiot would commit such words to the ever-retrievable electronic ether? Abramoff’s kind, it would appear.

 

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BUT OVER AND ABOVE all the individual and personal squalid details (and Abramoff is far from alone in his squalidness – besides DeLay, the ex-Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, the neo-con, anti-tax think-tank activist Grover Norquist, and the disgraced and imprisoned - but now released - ex-Congressman Bob Ney all have their roles explored and exposed) this fully convincing group-portrait demonstrates that America’s governance is, quite simply, available for sale.

With the blitheness that perhaps only a fallen political colossus can manage, and one who has tried to rebuild popular favor through sad exhibitionism on ABC TV’s high-rating Dancing with the Stars, Delay argues in Casino Jack that the free market economy should reign in the US political system absolutely unfettered. It looks now like 5 out of 9 US Supreme Court Justices take a very similar view. 

And we see in Casino Jack and the United States of Money just what that can mean.

  

 

MY ANNUAL HOMETOWN MOVIE EVENT, the Tribeca Film Festival - which opened yesterday and runs until May 2 - is showcasing three more of Gibney’s films – which seems a tad excessive, don’t you agree?

The Festival Committee, with forgivable hype, calls him “the hardest-working man in documentary film-making” – and while he’s not wholly responsible for Freakonomics, sharing the work with a starry team of co-directors, he is the leading light behind My Trip to Al-Qaeda, which is based on the play (and a powerful book) by Lawrence Wright, as well as an untitled work-in-progress that he’s brought to Tribeca about the rise and fall (and orchestrated rise again, now) of New York’s ex-Governor, Eliot Spitzer.

At a round-table with me and other film-oriented writers, Gibney set himself apart from many of his contemporaries in one significant stylistic choice. Many directors determinedly eschew as old-fashioned the device of “straight” narration, preferring to orchestrate their story-telling through the voices of their interviewees spliced creatively together (I’ve done it myself a lot, especially for American television) - and other sometimes self-conscious devices like title-cards. But in Casino Jack, as in many of his other docs, Gibney said “it feels more honest” not just to use a written-and-spoken narrative, but also to speak those words himself.

“A lot of documentaries seem to be fighting an old battle with an enemy that’s not an enemy anymore - the so-called ‘Voice of God’”, he told me. “I’ve written the narrative, so I see no pressing reason not to speak it”.

Indeed Gibney makes no bid for omniscience in his voice-over readings, still less for sanctity. His cool, undramatic delivery ensures that by contrast the Abramoff gang’s own egregious words and deeds are in effect screaming for our attention.

 

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