Barry Levinson (1997)
The President of the United States – seeking re-election and well ahead in the polls with less than two weeks to Election Day – is caught making advances to an underage girl in a room behind the Oval Office. While the President is on a trade visit to China, his team brings in spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) to divert attention from the scandal. Brean’s solution is a pretend war with Albania. He recruits a Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), to construct the illusion – fake news footage, a theme song, the works. The outrageous ruse is succeeding splendidly until the CIA gets wind of it. After an announcement that the war has ended, the abuse scandal edges back towards centre stage so Motss invents a subplot in the form of an American soldier left behind enemy lines. A military hero’s homecoming is arranged but Schumann (Woody Harrelson), the soldier supplied by the Pentagon for the role, is actually a criminally insane army convict serving time for rape. He’s shot dead while attempting another sexual assault. No matter: Motss, who repeatedly assures Brean and the others that he’s had to solve much bigger problems in the course of his Hollywood career, turns the homecoming into a military funeral. As Election Day draws nigh, however, Motss loses patience. This is a man who’s produced the Academy Awards show but has never himself won an Oscar; it’s intolerable to him that his latest production is hush-hush while plaudits head the way of the team behind the unimaginative ‘don’t change horses in midstream’ ads for the President’s campaign. He threatens to blow the gaff on the Albanian war in order to get recognition for his much more creative work. Brean promptly has Motss killed although the official cause of death is a heart attack. The President is re-elected.
The impact of Barry Levinson’s satirical black comedy Wag the Dog was increased by the timing of its original release. The film, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet and loosely based on Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel American Hero, opened in America in late 1997, just a few weeks before the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted (and a few months before the Clinton administration’s bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which some saw as diversionary action). Fake news may never have been bigger news than it is twenty years on from 1997 and the audience reaction to Wag the Dog in NFT2 (where it was showing as part of BFI’s Dustin Hoffman retrospective) was, from the very start, audibly strong and audibly knowing. That soundtrack hardened my resistance to the film. Its main themes – the distorting effects of television on the political process, war as a form of popular entertainment and of satisfying public appetites – are compelling but Wag the Dog has made its points in less than ten minutes: the success of the remaining ninety depends on inventive plotting, smart lines and effective acting. Although it has plenty of all three (even if Stanley Motss’s eleventh-hour decision to spill the beans is weakly contrived), the movie also has a blanketing smugness. It seems fuelled not by anger or even concern at the political chicanery and show-business egocentrism it’s lampooning but by a desire to be admired for its cynical cleverness. I found the filmmakers’ calculation at its most hateful when it was explained that Schumann was doing time for ‘raping a nun’. This got a good laugh in NFT2 though it clearly wouldn’t have if nun had been girl or woman.
There are compensations. Robert De Niro wears a silly ‘characterful’ hat throughout but it’s good to hear him handling so expertly dialogue that’s thoroughly witty and whose profusion isn’t the result of improvisational padding. Dustin Hoffman’s line readings are, of course, expert too – though the only time he made me smile was when he made a sound rather than speaking words: the President’s aide asks if Schumann has much of his prison sentence left to serve and Motss replies, in a tone of suppressed hysteria, ‘Hmmm’. Anne Heche works hard as the aide (the third biggest role): you’re always conscious of the effort. Woody Harrelson is alarmingly unhinged as Schumann. It’s interesting to see a fifteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst: she plays a young actress posing as a fetching Albanian peasant in Motss’s faux footage and frustrated to learn that the job is top secret and can’t go on her CV. William H Macy is good as a CIA agent though his character is too easily squished by Brean’s verbal onslaught. The President’s face remains unseen throughout. Willie Nelson is agreeable as the increasingly puzzled songwriter brought onto the team. The resulting songs are enjoyable too but I was more grateful for Mark Knopfler’s instrumental score. Its wistful quality supplies a rare and welcome suggestion that the abuses ridiculed in Wag the Dog might give rise to regret rather than self-satisfied contempt.
18 July 2017
