LITTLE ROCK — Disheartening though, at times, dizzyingly entertaining, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s meticulously researched Casino Jack and the United States of Money is a feast for wonks, and likely to baffle and confuse those who look to the movies for an escape from bottom line reality. It sketches, with daunting and convincing detail, a vast web of power and corruption presided over by the sort of brash, avaricious Washington lobbyist that any respectable screenwriter would seek to tone down and nuance up.
That man in the middle is the conservative Republican fixer Jack Abramoff, a former college weightlifter and erstwhile action movie producer (of the 1989 Dolph Lungren anti-communist screed Red Scorpion), who, in 2006, was convicted of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion, and of trading expensive gifts, meals and sports trips for political favors.
Abramoff - who declined to appear on camera but granted Gibney several extensive prison interviews - comes across in archival footage as a charismatic, self-deluded megalomaniac who may have genuinely believed he was “one of the good guys” even as he engaged in such karma-damaging activities.
While some of Abramoff’s “sins” might be excused as smash mouth politics by true believers, it’s difficult to rationalize Abramoff’s support for sweatshops in the Northern Mariana Islands - where, by virue of a technicality, manufacturers are allowed to sew “Made in the U.S.A.” labels into garments while not following U.S. labor laws - or his fantastic scheme to bilk the Malaysian government out of millions of dollars by setting up a phony think tank headed by a surfer dude who admits on camera that he’s “not qualified to run a Baskin-Robbins.”
And then, there’s an elaborate scheme in whichAbramoff and his associates actively encouraged lobbying against Indian casino interests so that those casinos would hire Abramoff’s firm to lobby for them. (This escapade was fictionalized in the most recent season of the HBO series Big Love, with Sissy Spacek starring as an Abramoff-esque lobbyist.)
While any one of these scandals might have made for an excellent documentary expose, part of the problem with Casino Jack (which shouldn’t be confused with the Kevin Spacey feature of the same name, about the same subject, scheduled for release this fall) is that Gibney is intent on following too many threads. And while he does so in a dogged, journalistically responsible fashion - albeit one leavened with some irritating snark and obvious musical puns - the sheer accumulation of facts tends to obscure what I take to be his larger point: that Abramoff is a symptom of a corrupt and smug culture of reciprocity and quid pro quo, where - as Abramoff wrote in one of dozens of damning e-mail messages Gibney shows us - “stupid people get wiped out.”
And though surprisingly candid interviews with Tom DeLay and Bob Ney - two former Republican congressmen burned by their close associations with Abramoff - are useful and instructive, the absence of Casino Jack himself leaves us with an unsatisfying, hollow feeling. Even from his prison cell, Jack Abramoff is still cutting deals.
MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 05/28/2010