Okay, here's the deal. I know there's a fine line we all tread every day between fantasy and reality. It wouldn't take a lot to just push some of us over the edge sometimes, leaving us all standing in the middle of traffic in our undies, screaming at flying monkeys and trying to write "surrender Dorothy" in the air with an ice scraper. There's so much craziness going on out there that you can't believe anything you see or hear. The stuff you hear on the news is so crazy, you have to think, "Somebody's making this up!"
Call it fate, call it Kismet, whatever, but there's one subject that personifies this entire idea better than any other. Politics. The absolute absurdity of how politicians think and function is mind-boggling. How people can say that they "work to represent the American people," and then go out of their way not to do anything that might involve making a decision is absurd. That these humans are the only ones in the country that get to vote themselves pay raises, while the rest of the country has to hold their breath to earn a 5% cost of living increase is mind-boggling. That we keep voting for these egotistical rectal openings, so they can do it to us for another two, four, or six years is sad.
Thankfully, there are folks out there, like yours truly, who thrive off satire. Take the absurd and make it even more absurd. Make it comical, and then we can all laugh at the idiocy of it all. Right? The Master, Mel Brooks, is a hero of the Satire Wars. The original "Saturday Night Live" was a visual Bible of political and cultural satire, unlike its 1998 counterpart, the poorest excuse for comedy on television and simply unworthy to be mentioned alongside the memories of Belushi, Aykroyd, Radner, Chase, Murray, Curtain, Morris, and Newman. Thank the Great Ones that Dennis Miller escaped before the Demon That Is Dana Carvey dragged him away. Miller is now the wandering prophet of Satire, converting millions to his ideas. Dennis, if you're out there, save Norm MacDonald now that NBC has freed him from the Evil.
But I digress. Satire only works when it chomps into the truth, when it echoes the reality of the subject at hand. So, when Wag The Dog came out, it was being pushed as absurdist satire, a laughable look at what might happen. Guess what, folks? "What might happen" did happen, and it happened bigger than all
Hay-ull. And that only makes this fantastic movie even more funny, even more brilliant. The "fiction" not only echoed the "fact," but the facts might just be even more insane than the fiction.
Conrad Bream (Robert De Niro) is a heavy-duty political spin doctor who is called to the White House for some heavy-duty doctoring. It seems that the President of the US has been a bad boy here a few short weeks before the next presidential election. Ol' Pres has lured an underage Firefly Girl into a hidden room just off the Oval Office for a little, uh, well, let's just say he wasn't buying cookies. The opposition is already running ads using the song "Thank Heaven For Little Girls" as the tag, and things are looking bad.
But Bream is a sleight-of-hand master when it comes to political legerdemain. He has helped cover scandals for many a moon. He lives by the motto "To change the story, change the lead." He orders the President to extend a trip to Asia and start issuing official denials that a new experimental bomber has been activated ahead of schedule. Folks start wondering, "What's going on with this new bomber?" Then Bream starts a war.
Well, not exactly a war. He invents a phony international confrontation with Albania, deciding on the "enemy" because nobody is sure where it is, nobody really cares where it is, and you dang sure can't find out what's going on over there firsthand. (Think about it - do you know any Albanian-Americans?) But Conrad needs some gloss to go with the story, so he hires Hollywood mega-producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman). Motss is a little skeptical about the whole thing until Bream proves his connections in the White House by grabbing a cel phone and having a White House spokesman repeat a line during a live press conference. When Motss sees this, the war is on.
Stanley organizes the design of a logo for the war, so all the news channels have graphics. He runs up some fake footage of an Albanian girl, fleeing from Albanian guerrilla rapists with her little kitten. In actuality, the girl is actress Tracy Lime (Kirsten Dunst), and the kitten is a bag of Tostito chips. The film gets computer doctored a la Forrest Gump, and suddenly, footage of the atrocities in Albania. Add to this an army of Albanian terrorists sneaking across the border from Canada with "suitcase bombs," and you've got a nice little international threat.
Every war needs a good hero and a great song, right? Stanley contracts Willie Nelson for a quick anthem, and digs up a martyr-of-the-minute, one Sgt. William Schumann, known as "good ol' Shoe," who is reportedly rescued from the hands of the Albanian Evil and flown home for a hero's welcome. Ol' Shoe even gets his own gesture - kids begin throwing their old sneakers all over the place, at basketball games and such, showing their old shoes for "good ol' Shoe."
The script here is phenomenally hip, coming from the flagbearer of great dialogue, David Mamet, and Hilary Henkin, who based their work on the book American Hero by Larry Beinhart. Barry Levinson directs a funny movie that also shows a lot of what goes into marketing a war, as we all saw with the Gulf War (which, by the way, has long been referred to as the "the Persian Gulf Distraction" by some political higher-ups, because it took everyone's mind off Iran-Contra and other domestic issues). The shallowness and subjectivity that goes into the reporting, the scare tactics that force a sense of patriotism at all costs, the silliness of the speech making and pundit-harping, all get their time to radiate in this movie, so we can all see the stupidity behind the spotlights.
De Niro is fantastic as Bream, way more understated than we're used to seeing. He turns all the hard acting inward, making Conrad Bream as introspective and sneaky as he should be, without playing him over the top. Anne Heche, as White House aide Winifred Ames, plays a deadpan funny that would rival comedian Steven Wright. Woody Harrellson's quick work as "good ol' Shoe" is hysterical. But, folks, ain't no one going to top Dustin Hoffman's performance as Stanley Motss. This is Dustin's return to absolute greatness, with a character more thought out and complete than his role(s) in Tootsie. Stanley is the epitome of everything in Hollywood that deserves satirizing. He's blindingly smart, he's hopelessly insecure, he's depressed because he'll never get the "screen credit" for the masterpiece of his career, namely, the Albanian Crisis. His superwhite smile gleams with insincerity as brightly as it shines when he's happy. His mountain of hair looks as processed as his career. He's a miracle of falsehood and bravado. (Rumour has it that Hoffman is merely doing a dead-on impression of legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans.)
And, yes, folks, this movie is even funnier when you think it through with a copy of today's newspaper. Brother Bill is chin-deep in Zippergate '98, with that young female of the hussy persuasion. And, suddenly, everybody wants to get real mean with Saddam Hussein, that pecan log running Iraq, hiding his germ warfare bombs under his bed and barring UN officials from staying the night in the palace. Everyone was all for economic sanctions and such, and suddenly, all of Washington is ready to turn that desert into a huge pane of glass with another round of complete carpet bombing? Get where I'm going here???
Whatever the reason, you absolutely gotta go see Wag the Dog. It's funny beyond belief, everything in it works on about three levels, and, who knows, here in a couple of weeks, we might get our own "good ol' Shoe." Remember how everyone loved "Stormin' Norman"?
Copyrighted image courtesy of New Line Cinema.
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