[Editor’s Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there’s been an Internet. Therefore it’s no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]
The script, formerly titled Bagman, has been retitled Casino Jack, perhaps in candor or maybe hope, as the structure echoes Martin Scorsese’s masterwork Casino. That film’s narrative structure, the film noir plot which begins near the end, with voice over by the protagonist in an ambiguous time warp, then rewinds to skip around in the plot back to the earlier scene, is replicated in Casino Jack. Such imitation is revealing, as Scorsese’s Casino gives us nothing less than the essence of an era, the golden age of Las Vegas, before it is destroyed by the characters we follow, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, Nicky Santoro, Ginger, and the old-time mob, through failures of limits, trust, growth, and awareness, to be overtaken by corporate ownership.
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Casino Jack harbors similar aspirations, the essence of an era, in this case ostensibly the Bush II era. But it is the “Republican Revolution” that Casino Jack targets, and after beginning with the Washington Post exposure and bust of the fictional “Jack Abramoff” and the murder of “Gus Boulis,” we discover the 21 year old Jack rooted in 1980, a college Republican riding in a campaign limo with “Ronald Reagan” himself, who counsels Jack: never surrender; there are no constraints on the human mind; no walls around the human spirit; no barriers to our progress except those we erect ourselves; the family is everything; all great changes in America begins around the dinner table. This is Casino Jack’s foundational Reaganite wisdom, though Reagan will return and give Jack a cryptic warning, too late, about idealism.
This Jack is an agent of smashmouth capitalism. Early on we see him busted in his Gulfstream wearing a $1000 Armani suit. He is the son of a “Rat Pack” former Diners Club president now retired to Palm Springs, raised in Beverly Hills, and has become a superstar Washington lobbyist representing Indian tribes’ gambling interests. Jack also invests, through homeboy “Adam Kidan” (think Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro) in Florida offshore gambling boats and owns a fancy restaurant in DC. He represents the Northern Mariana Islands, where his Congressman friend vacations, entertained by a “nubile young Asian woman,” and which manufactures “in the rag trade” under “Made in USA” labels, not subject to US labor law. It is an increasingly murky, tragic saga of greedy Republican financial chicanery. When things unravel, a partner at Jack’s firm compares the whole debacle to Enron.
Besides the economics, there is also a cultural aspect to Casino Jack’s Republican Revolution. Cornered by the Washington Post and various investigations, Jack declares that he’s being attacked by the worst people in our culture. Jack’s wife Pam is a pale, long suffering, cheerful blonde soccer mom who drinks too much, while Jack puffs Cuban cigars. When son Alex’s band teacher turns out to be gay, Jack declares that his kids will be “normal” and fearing “the gays” will try to convert his kids he goes on to found his own private school, Eshkol Academy, dedicated to conservative Jewish learning.
The role of fundamentalist religion in Casino Jack’s version of the Republican Revolution is enormous. When he is arrested, the omniscient voice-over Jack tells us that he believes God has a plan for him, a God who has been with him from the very beginning. Cut to: Ronald Reagan. Afterwards Jack’s voice informs us that like Moses looking for a light in the darkness he found his in a beautiful shining city on a hill.
In this formulation, Jack and his allies are a band of true believers and Reagan their deity. These allies, including “Tom Delay,” “Grover Norquist,” and “Ralph Reed” assemble as a Capital Hill Bible Study Group, where Jack testifies that Republican beliefs share the same moral beliefs as God and God wants people to be liquid.
This blurring of God and Reagan does not prevent Jack from manipulating the flock. At Scotland’s St. Andrew’s golf course, Jack conspires with the Chief of the Saginaw Chippewas against the nearby Jena tribe opening a casino. Jack suggests they mobilize Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed to launch a crusade opposing gambling. Throughout this script we get such combinations of claims of righteousness with duplicitous, venal, even evil acts.
That Jack is an orthodox Jew provides a certain cover for the script’s anti-religious theme, one that eventually explodes in a disgusting scene, a snark’s attempt at The Merchant of Venice, full of smugness and hate. Eventually there is a point at which such adolescent pique, with it anti-capitalist, anti-Judeo-Christian, Manichean reflexes becomes indistinguishable from a jihadist world view.
Finally, the paramount mission of exposing Reaganite corruption becomes this script’s downfall. We meet the fictional Reagan, Delay, Reed, Norquist, Bob Ney, and Karl Rove, as they pass through in a one-dimensional kabuki of the left’s villains. This leaves the script, unlike Casino, with no dramatic structure, no conflict, just the study of bad characters going down. In this way it resembles Oliver Stone’s revisionist histories, more broadside than dimensional drama.
Judged in these terms, it’s just more vulgar Marxist history from Hollywood, stigmatizing opposition politics that has already been criminalized. It is arguable that the real Jack Abramoff was coerced into guilty pleas, that he did not commit wire fraud, that he facilitated the Indian tribes’ enormous financial successes, and that his “honest services fraud” is an especially bad joke these days.
During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama promised “Lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House.” Last March Isi Siddiqui became the 50th lobbyist appointed to a policy-making job by Obama, four of which were among recess appointments, without confirmation votes. Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, not officially registered as a lobbyist, among Big Labor donors of $400 million to Obama’s campaign, visited the White House 36 times in 2009, SEIU Treasurer Anna Burger 39 times. Democrat lobbying firm The Raben Group, including an all-star roster of former staffers for Democrat and liberal causes, trumpeted their role in ObamaCare as a “Success,” including: $1.5 billion home visitation for client Nurse Family Partnership; $6.3 billion in Medicaid for US territories, including $1 billion for Puerto Rican Latinos United for Healthcare, created by Raben; easing approval for biotech drugs for Amgen; training and development on behalf of Direct Care Alliance; and requirement of insurance information on resources for Compassion & Choices.
While the Hollywood left wanks over its antique cartoon models of corruption, Obama and the progressives have backed up the truck and are looting the public treasury like Third World kleptocrats.
Note: It’s important to note, the script is not the film (which hits theatres Dec. 12th), but simply most of the plot, about half of character, and very little of the setting and filmic style. It’s a real caution, especially in a film featuring as strong an acting talent as Kevin Spacey.
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