FREEDONIA'S GOING TO WAR by Kristian Lin
Director Barry Levinson shot WAG THE DOG in 29 days, which was smart strategy. The film doesn't feel slapped together, but captures the feverish pace of a presidential campaign's waning days. Levinson's filmmaking hasn't had this much energy since his early career. He seemed to be in an irreversible decline, turning out dreck like DISCLOSURE and SLEEPERS. But his artistic talents have only been hibernating. With his fellow-travelling scriptwriter Paul Attanasio, he has been an unseen power behind some of the decade's most thoughtful movies (QUIZ SHOW, DONNIE BRASCO) as well as one of TV's best shows ("Homicide: Life on the Street"). WAG THE DOG reveals that he has been a guerrilla filmmaker all along.
When the President is caught in a sex scandal shortly before an election, his aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) hires political consultant Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro), who brings in Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman). Their idea is to divert attention from the President's misbehavior by faking a war between the U.S. and Albania.
Most of this movie's juice comes from the teaming of De Niro and Hoffman, who both turn in their best work in years. De Niro knows that the other part's the showboat, so he plays the straight man to great effect. His cool, low-key style hides an unflappable authority that makes him the rock amid the campaign's welter of activity.
Hoffman's performance, though, is the real marvel. Stanley Motss is a natural at politics: he's always responding to the latest crisis with a jolly "This is nothing!" Hoffman gives us an egomaniac who's seen everything, but also homes in on the relish with which the movie producer does his job. Motss is no artist, but he's a creative genius of a hasty, improvisatory sort who's always bubbling over with ideas. I wish we could have seen the kind of movies he makes - is he Saul Zaentz, Harvey Weinstein, or Jerry Bruckheimer? (My guess is the latter.) This is the most compelling portrait of a Hollywood suit since Tim Robbins's Griffin Mill in THE PLAYER. They may both be soulless money men with a deep contempt for audiences, but Motss is far more likeable than the paranoid, humorless Mill.
The problem is the movie shares his contempt. It assumes unthinking, monolithic response from the people and the media. WAG THE DOG would have been more interesting exploring the ways in which different segments of the culture react to media hype. It's uncharacteristic of writer David Mamet to be so shallow (he shares script credit with Hilary Henkin, but there's some dispute as to her contribution, and this movie plays as a Mamet script anyway). The movie's cynicism is cheap, arrogant, and almost succeeds in being a real turn-off, especially at the end, when they try to create a war hero out of a psychotic rapist (Woody Harrelson). It could have worked if the movie had had some of the sheer comic lunacy of DUCK SOUP or DR. STRANGELOVE to leaven things. The Coen brothers could have done that, but it isn't Mamet and Levinson's game.
Heche's character is a third wheel (the usual situation for a woman in a Mamet production). Ames's purpose in the story is to fret when the situation gets tense and then gape at the old pros' public-relations wizardry, but Heche makes both states of mind watchably funny. Willie Nelson and Jay Leno are great as a drug-addled folk balladeer and a standup comic who tells bad jokes, respectively. And William H. Macy gives the movie a jolt as a starchy CIA agent who knows what's going down ("When the fit hits the shan, someone's going to have to stay after school," he chirps). WAG THE DOG is too glib to be a great political satire, but it's a sign that Barry Levinson hasn't lost his filmmaking skills.
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