Toronto – Jack Abramoff produced films… such as the Red Scorpion here. How did he become the top lobbyist on the Hill? The answer is closer to fiction than you think. Casino Jack and the United States of Money is a mesmerizing whirlwind tour of American politics from the vantage point of a lobbyist – the world’s your oyster and the only problems are regulations.
This is a fairly efficient portrait of everyone involved in the Abramoff/Scanlon scandal… after the fact. So most of the characters involved (Former Congressmen Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, and their aides) are interviewed with the occasional input from journalists who uncovered the whole deal to begin with. Due to the magnitude of the story, there’s ample material to work with. To make a long story short: the film tracks Jack Abramoff and his connections from his College Republican National Committee days, right up to the Inidan casino scandal. These political connections often come back as guests or accomplices, nodes off the main branch story.
Ultimately the film is depressing. As you shake your head in disbelief you also realize that it was allowed to occur. Since the roots went fairly deep, it deserves to be seen by all – it gives a better handle for future events. To navigate the audience through a story this big in its entirety in 2 hrs is simply not a task for the uninitiated. Gibney and his team has really simplified the dots so it’s easy to connect. Those cutesy flow diagrams help, too. Was it greed or simply riding off the wave that was there? When the thread gets stretched from Chinese slave labour to Malaysians, from native tribes to Mexican casinos and Russian mobs, you just want to say: “No more”. I don’t really want to know how the model democracy of the day operates on rotten flesh of the disadvantaged. The narrative has a distinctive investigative journalism feel – basically the extended version of what you would find on DocZone or Fifth Estate, sans a host. Many of the cutback schemes, connections, characters (and especially the emails) are preposterously funny. To hear about ploys of tacking beneficial bits of legislative loopholes on bills in the Congress, FROM A CONGRESSMAN, really brings it home. (Since we’re following the American model, I wonder how long it’ll take the Canadians to copy that trick?) To those of you who are intimately familiar with this story it may not be news – then the value of the documentary may vary. But to me the film was engaging and manages to transform a political maelstrom into a clown show by relating Jack Abramoff to a spy novel protagonist. The whole thing DOES read like a fiction – too bad it’s real.
