Casino Jack Review

Originally published in the Prep News.

In the Prep News’s recent remembrance of SLUH filmmaker George Hickenlooper, Nick Fandos chews on a quote from Joe Schulte about the director’s interest in telling stories about people living on the outside of the world they populate, and trying to fight their way in. “In a way,” Fandos asserts, “that outsider was Hickenlooper.”

It seems strange then that the filmmaker’s most recent work, Casino Jack (which premiered at the Saint Louis International Film Festival last night) is through and through a Hollywood film. After all, it stars the bankable Kevin Spacey and it boasts a deft, fast-paced script from studio sweetheart Norman Snider. More than anything, it appears to come out of a period of swiftly paced but grandly designed topical films like, say, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps or David Fincher’s The Social Network. Hollywood, it seems, has finally caught up with the wave of grimy, slimy events of the last decade. If the 2000s were about immediate indictments of failing systems in documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2010s appear to be about using those events as templates on which to construct tight, character-based narratives. Even this summer’s Will Ferrell comedy blockbuster, The Other Guys, built its story around cops who are out to bust money launderers instead of drug dealers. At first glance, Casino Jack is just one more Hollywood film made by, apparently, one more set of Hollywood insiders.

It’s hard, also, to immediately find the connection between Schulte’s outsider claim and Hickenlooper’s chosen subject: Washington super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. By all first impressions, Abramoff is nothing if not an insider. He shoots through back doors of the Capital and smiles while he hands Senators corporate kickbacks. We quickly learn that these are the men who really make things happen in Washington. In one early scene, we travel through Jack’s office and see the framed photos of Abramoff alongside Republican mastermind Karl Rove and House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Soon we see the Ronald Reagan baseball cap that sits on a plaque by Abramoff’s desk and a thank-you note signed by President Bush. If anything, we’re thinking, this guy is the insider’s insider.

Hickenlooper is also quick to marry the big-budget Hollywood scene with the politics of Washington—Abramoff had, at one time, produced a few Dolph Lundgren flicks and he and his lobbyist cronies spend all day spouting out classic movie quotes and impressions, usually borne from Robert De Niro gangster movies. Abramoff, in his slick-laced humor, tells off a Senator by stating that “Washington D.C. is Hollywood for ugly people.” Certainly, Jack shows us that Washington, like Hollywood, is a world dominated by a tight relationship between approval and ego, where how you think about yourself is defined by what everyone else thinks about you. In the first scene, we listen in as Jack gives himself a pep-talk while he brushes his teeth. He talks about the “disease of the dull” that he fights against, that those around him who do not do and do not act are nothing more than slaves to mediocrity. There are few other moments of incredible outbursts of tragic-hero hubris where the usually mild-mannered Abramoff explodes into incalculable rage, yelling “I’m Jack Abramoff, the one Time magazine called the most important man in Washington.” I think of the end of Macbeth when the mulish king announces loudly to young Siward, “My name’s Macbeth” and then moves in to slay him. It’s hard not to wonder if Hickenlooper ever received that same worksheet we all did in Sophomore English about the qualities of a tragic hero.

It’s at these moments of incredible emotion and inflated ego that the viewer starts to wonder if a classic Hollywood piece is all Hickenlooper has up his sleeve. Around a fourth of the way through the film, we learn of Abramoff’s devout Jewishness. He says his prayers, he wears his Yamaka, and he preaches about using his money to give back to the community by creating a top-level Hebrew school and new addition to the Jewish Community Center. Suddenly our Washington, hubris-headed insider is something fundamentally different. He’s a Jew in the land of born-again Christians. And where his lobbyist cronies buy mansions and speedboats and shuffle from affair to affair, Abramoff stays at home with his wife and kids and invests his money in restaurant ventures to help finance his community projects. “I want to give back,” he tells his wife. And, of course, Kevin Spacey is acting it all out. Spacey holds a common and comforting face but, as he does in most roles, quickly subverts all that normality into something kinetic and, often, strange.

Ultimately, Abramoff is able to rationalize his work by latching on to a few moral footholds by lobbying for under-represented Native American Tribes and other ethnic outsiders. Perhaps the film’s most haunting scene plays out when Jack’s main lobbying partner talks about his plans to kick an adversary while he’s down. Not only are we going to kick him, he says to Jack, we’re gonna gouge out his eyes and rip out his teeth. “Don’t do that,” Jack says, “that’s bad karma.”

And, of course, what ensues is serving after serving of bad karma. After the first part of his community work, Abramoff’s financials start to dive and swerve until he gets involved in bad deal after bad deal. It’s not so much what Abramoff does, but what happens under his watch. A wave of excess and greed and rather un-kosher acts that bubble up around him start to bring him down. There’s also, though, the nature of Abramoff’s own vaulting ambition and his desire to no longer be the faceless man behind the scenes. Ultimately, the film finds incredible strength and power in the conflict between the Jewish family man and the Hollywood cowboy.

Hickenlooper, too, works subtly and tirelessly to make these twin personalities pull at each other. In addition to the scores of gangster film cross-references, he also adds a touch of an alienated hero approach. As Abramoff brushes his teeth and peps himself up in the film’s first scene, it’s hard not to think of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. These are hard-nosed characters, sure—they’re bullies, even killers. But they’re also lovers living in the gutter, outcasts that fate picks around and then throws into the drainpipes. Ultimately, Casino Jack makes us ask the question that all great films of its kind do: why do we care so much about such rotten people? The answer, I guess, is because those rotten people are people too.

What’s most interesting, though, is how exactly Hickenlooper guides us to these questions. Those familiar with my reviews will recall that I reached very similar conclusions at the end of my treatise on The Social Network. Hickenlooper’s film, though, accomplishes something that The Social Network, or any other similar film for that matter, doesn’t. With Casino Jack, Hickenlooper created a film from a true story of real events and real people that, in the end, still is a real movie—one that gains traction from ideas pulled from old gangster and noir flicks that the director must have spent hours and years consuming in dark rooms. Hickenlooper treats the world of those old De Niro and Brando films so seriously that he’s willing to put them into a story that the whole world already knows about. He’s willing to say that those films mean something in the way we really think, in the people we really are. It’s a daring act, and one that rarely is attempted, let alone succeeds. Casino Jack is a movie hopping between reality and illusion, truth and theatricality. Towards the end, we witness an explosive sequence only to find out it was all imagined. It’s this fusion between reality and illusion, journalism and filmmaking that makes our willful suspension of disbelief both easy and terrifyingly hard. Hickenlooper’s working from the inside out and the outside in—a technician and a rebel, a truth-teller and a mythmaker.