Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
I didn’t have any hopes that Barry Levinson would ever make a good movie – or at least one I’d like. Everyone raved about Diner. I thought it was self-indulgent, adolescent crap. Rain Man won Oscars. I thought it sentimental, badly styled rubbish (why did everything, but everything, have to be in shades of blue?). Sphere was a bloated and entirely dull sci-fi underwater actioner; Good Morning Vietnam was an over-extended and far-too- loud vehicle for Robin Williams’s eccentric improvisation; Sleepers was a faintly offensive and overplayed psychodrama.
Only Tin Men managed to evoke a grin from me, although I loathe Danny de Vito’s gloating love of how he’s so small but so famous and rich.
So it came as a major endorsement of some latent talent that Levinson’s latest effort, Wag the Dog, is a fabulous movie. Perhaps it’s the script, co-authored by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, or that Levinson, who started movie-life as a collaborator with Mel Brooks, has finally realised how to make a low-key intelligent comedy without shoving everything very persistently in our faces.
This marvellous satire, based on the book American Hero by Larry Beinhart, presents a United States in which the public is a sleeping dog, being wagged every which way by corrupt leaders and manipulative media.
Robert de Niro plays Conrad Brean, a Washington spin doctor brought in by the president to divert attention from his most recent sex romp with a teenager just 11 days before he is up for re-election.
“Nothing short of a war could divert the public’s attention,” says the president’s aide (played by Anne Heche, anchoring all the other stars as a kind of bystander). So the public is dished up a fictional war with Albania, co-ordinated by megalomaniac Hollywood producer Stanley Motts (silent t), played with merry enthusiasm by Dustin Hoffman. Together they produce a “pageant” for the public, some war footage constructed in a Los Angeles studio with the help of blue screen, a We Are the World-type theme song – anything to make the nation believe that the US is going to war and the president is in control.
Things get nasty. Even Woody Harrelson makes an appearance as a psychotic ex-soldier let out of a psychiatric hospital to play a war hero. Hoffman’s character’s response: “You think this is hard? Try a 10am pitch meeting coked to the gills. And you haven’t even read the treatment. This is easy.”
While the idea might seem far-fetched, the writers, director and actors keep the bold and cynical approach firmly in balance. They don’t play it for farce, and they under-inflate the comic possibilities to make the movie’s assertions a deeply funny and a scathingly serious indictment of Hollywood, politicians and above all the couch-potato American public.
In Wag the Dog the government wags the media, while in turn the media wag the people. Hoffman and De Niro obviously delight in sparring with each other, and Levinson manages to make the ludicrous premise seem real, and threateningly funny. It’s a sign of Levinson’s talent that the situations never spiral out of control. The publicists are boasting that it was shot for a meagre $15-million and in only 29 days, so it just goes to show that big budgets and over-inflated egos lead to crappy movies.
It’s about time Levinson, and for that matter most of Hollywood, started taking the modest, intelligent and witty option. And for the public to endorse it by seeing this and avoiding the trash on most of the circuit.
So I’m sorry, Mr Levinson has resolutely failed to cut the mustard for me. In fact I’ve often thought of him as a complete hack of a helmer – watching his movies makes me think of him lounging in Beverly Hills or having pretentious lunches at Spago on Sunset Boulevard. And not at all about the movie in view.