May

3

CASINO JACK & THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY

Documentary by Alex Gibney

This is a scathing, carefully researched Dorian Gray portrait of super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, from his youth in college as a handsome, gung-ho GOP political activist, to the pariah disgrace of his recent years anterior to his imprisonment.

The topography of the film covers an unprecedented mapwork of unlikelies: Indian reservations, Russian operatives, Chinese sweatshops and mob Mafias in Miami. The film proffers a vast archive of clips, photos, recorded speeches, talking associates and former colleagues, newspapers–the whole array of the documentarian today, hewing not into alarmist territory, but managing to coolly limn the way monetary influence molds and corrupts the political process. Not news, certainly, but glaringly obvious in the unspooling of this riveting docu. Proof again that newspaper and TV have yielded the high ground on exposes and longitudinal coverage to the deft (well-funded) filmmaker/documentarian.

Oscar-awardee Gibney paints how the nature of politicians' campaigns and continuous scratching for re-election most probably distorts the entire politics of the American enterprise. Interesting and undeniably fun footage of college kegger times of such latter-day luminaries as Tom De Lay, George Bush the younger, Karl Rove as a cherubic sage with hair, pols of the left and right of the past four decades, CASINO JACK is hard to deny as a marathon tale of untrammeled entrepreneurship, flackery and greed.

One tries to be cynical about the reportage, but it disarms us with its cumulative argument, and claims our undivided attention.

Maybe somewhere in the country's attic, Abramoff is still the uninflected buff promising guy he started out to be.


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