When it comes to documentaries dealing with corporate and political misdeeds they seem to run together. Someone did something bad, it involves a lot of different people, exploitation and arrogance was involved, there’s a paper trail or voice mails or both and justice in one way or another was served while others were let off the hook. They are also extraordinarily infuriating and depressing. Alex Gibney’s Casino Jack and the United States of America is no different and feels very much like his 2005 doc, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. For as competent as Casino Jack is, it ends with text telling us where each member of the scandal is now and as most often is the case, the punishment never seems to fit the crime.
I don’t wade deep into the financial and political news sector. When important happenings occur they cross my radar. The story of Jack Abramoff was a vague one to me. I knew he was a super lobbyist and knew he had found trouble that went all the way to the top. It was trouble that involved several important political figures. However, the specifics were beyond me and as Gibney began laying the cards on the table the waters got even murkier before they ever started making sense.
The synopsis for the film tells us we are in for a story involving “high rollers in Indian casinos, hookers in Saipan, a murdered Greek tycoon, Cold War spy novels, plush trips to paradise and the United States Congress,” but beyond that the players in each scenario must be introduced and those are simply a few of the more headline grabbing the highlights. At one point Casino Jack becomes a mish-mash of names, dates, locations and handshakes over financial transactions. Email transcripts, charts that look like convoluted spider webs and voicemails begin filling in blanks when I didn’t think there could be any more blanks to fill. Suffice to say, I was following what Gibney was offering, but midway through I felt like I was lost in the forest with about 150 different maps, all of them offering a single piece of my way out of the woods if I could only put them together.
Then, Gibney pulls off what I assumed would be impossible. He brings it all together. The names, places, emails, voicemails, casinos, hookers, exploited workers, politicians, lifeguard CEOs, money trails, action movies starring Dolph Lundgren, everything. This isn’t a documentary where you will walk away remembering all of the specifics, but it is definitely a two hour crash course into the despicable nature of a high profile lobbyist and how he probably would have never been caught had he not gotten so greedy and gone about his maneuvering so haphazardly. After all, people were making money, why would they let the cat out of the bag?
Gibney gets several players on camera, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, former Congressman Bob Ney and Ney’s one-time Chief of Staff Neil Volz who offers up what is probably the most fascinating moment in the film, when he basically says that at one point he looked at what they were doing, wondered for a split second if it was “right” and then blew right past it. Depending on how you’ve led your life and to what extent you would go to better your social and financial standing, it’s jaw-dropping stuff. If you ever doubted whether the American government was for sale, this movie will eliminate that doubt.
A documentary is meant to inform and enlighten and hopefully even entertain. Casino Jack does all of this while at times opening doors to so many players, folks such as myself that aren’t as “in the loop” as others may tend to get lost. However, he does an excellent job of bringing it all back around from the film’s opening gunshot to the white text over black letting us know it still isn’t over yet.
