Casino Jack, the George Hickenlooper directed depiction of Jack Abramoff’s downfall, opens in the Washington area this week. You ought to see it.
I attended the premier a month or so ago, enjoyed it and would recommend it, particularly to a Washington-acclimated audience.
Casino Jack is fiction, but as Tom Clancy once said the only difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction has to be real. Casino Jack has that air of exaggerated reality and enjoys the reputation of having depicted Jack Abramoff in a way some of his friends and acquaintances said was fair and accurate. I wouldn’t know about that. I met the guy once, in a receiving line.
The movie is the story of excess, excesses in politics, in business, in human relationships, in human behavior, in the prosecution of crime, and maybe even in religious zeal. What a nice touch Hollywood offers for this Judeo-Christian holiday season.
The Abramoff saga is really three stories in one, his personal and religious life, his lobbying work, and his nefarious business ventures. The stories are brought together at one intersection where we are witness to the utter destruction of the man, his family, his business and several of those who for a variety of reasons, called him “friend”. The movie leads us to the conclusion that Abramoff was brought to that intersection by his obsessive need to accumulate wealth to satisfy religiously-motivated ambitions.
Kevin Spacey is brilliant as Abramoff. He is an actor of extraordinary skill, precision and artistic flair. When you look up at the screen and you see the character and not the actor playing the character, to me that is acting. I never once looked at the screen and saw Spacey. I saw Abramoff.
Other members of the cast were excellent as well, Barry Pepper as Abramoff partner Michael Scanlon and Jon Lovitz as the gangster-connected mattress baron, who joins with Abramoff and Scanlon in the floating casino business that ultimately brought them down. The screenwriters, Hickenlooper and the cast did a superb job of drawing you into the drama, the humor, the tragedy and the absurdity of Abramoff’s world.
It is doubtful that former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and political activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed will think much of how they were depicted. They weren’t treated well, nor was Abramoff partner Scanlon. But were they treated fairly? The fact is they all were party to episodes of scandalous excesses that made a mockery of native Americans, politics and politicians, lobbying, business and religion. So, you decide.
The clarity given the separate stories in the Abramoff affair is relevant and pertinent to understanding what happened to him and why. The public perception of Abramoff is that of a Washington lobbyist, but his transgressions were not confined to lobbying and, in fact, he was sent to prison for crimes unrelated to his lobbying shenanigans. The same holds true for DeLay, who has been convicted and is waiting appeal on charges unrelated to his relationship with Abramoff or his associations with lobbyists.
The movie gives just credit to the press for exposing Abramoff’s exploitation of native Americans who he charged outrageous fees for allegedly protecting their gambling casino holdings, but it fragrantly ignores the sky-is-falling hype of the Abramoff coverage overall. You would have thought half the Congress and its staff and most of the lobbying community were going to be hit with ‘criminal charges’ for ‘sweeping misconduct’, to use Washington Post terminology. No other charges were brought against staff that I recall and only one other lobbyist was charged, tried and convicted. The reality is Abramoff wasn’t symptomatic, emblematic or reflective of much of anything lobbyists do on a day-to-day basis.
Casino Jack is a movie worth seeing, regardless of your religious affiliation, profession, political convictions or heritage. It’s entertaining. It’s quality craftsmanship. Its good storytelling. It’s yet another look at ourselves and in Washington we can never seem to get enough of that.
