You Don’t Know Jack

It’s official: We’re living in a world so ridiculous that satire is superfluous. Casino Jack makes for a wickedly hilarious Exhibit A

Ken Woroner/ATO Pictures

Sadly, George Hickenlooper, until now best known as the codirector of Hearts of Darkness, the great documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, died suddenly in his sleep at age 47 in October while he was in Denver to attend an early premiere of his new feature film, Casino Jack. But he has left us a rare treat. An uproarious black comedy, Casino Jack elicits outright guffaws from the viewer—which is saying something, because we're all the butt of the joke. This reality-based movie's charismatic antihero is Jack Abramoff, gorgeously played by Kevin Spacey as the slickest, greediest, and most colorfully corrupt of Washington lobbyists.

The action is set in the era just behind us, when the Bush administration and both Republican-controlled houses of Congress actually invited lobbyists to write the laws affecting the industries for which they shilled. Collusion was the name of the game, only the politicians called it being business-friendly. Abram­off knew better: He was a hustler on a grand scale, and the more outrageous the hustle, the happier he got. An adrenaline pumper from start to finish, Casino Jack is full of dubious characters who are great fun to watch, including Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper), Abramoff's wild-man partner in crime, and Jon Lovitz and Maury Chaykin as two of the funniest lowlifes ever to grace a movie screen. Hickenlooper and his screenwriter, Norman Snider, also had the good sense to brighten the proceedings with two sharp, engaging women—Abram­off's pretty-as-a-button shiksa wife, Pam (Kelly Preston), and Scanlon's beautiful red-haired fiancée, Emily Miller (Rachelle Lefevre), who proves to be more than just the material girl she initially seems. But what makes the movie really riveting is the mirror it holds up to our increasingly tattered democracy.

American films set in the world of politics tend to be paranoid thrillers, whether it's The Manchurian Candidate (the 1962 original, please) or Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power (1997). What they have in common is good guys and bad guys, with the bad guys highly placed (hey, the president is a sex killer!). But in Casino Jack, the lines aren't neatly drawn. Bad people do good things, good people do bad things, and that's the source of the movie's humor as well as its bedrock realism. Abramoff is a devoted family man—his pursed-lip disapproval of Scanlon's sexual antics is no joke. He's also an observant Jew, preaching at temple on such unintentionally risible topics as "Does God want us to be financially ­liquid?" and lavishing some of his ill-gotten gains on a new Hebrew school. Like many a robber baron, he's trying to bribe his way into heaven. But for all of Abramoff's charm, Hickenlooper doesn't let him off the hook. Greasing politicians' palms is how the game is played; screwing huge lobbying fees out of casino-rich Native American clients and simply pocketing the money isn't. Worse is what he privately calls the tribes: monkeys, ­morons, and troglodytes.

Abramoff loved scamming people; it gave him the same hot thrill of power as having a lot of money to splash around did. Ultimately, his grandiosity took him down, into an underworld far dirtier than Washington and much more dangerous. That the filmmakers mine even that ghastly demimonde for ferocious humor is their best trick. As for Abramoff, he's lucky he got caught ­before he got killed. What's really scary is that, having been a model prisoner, his sentence was shortened, and as of December 4, he's baaaack.

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