Review of Casino Jack (2010) by Shiira — 10 Mar 2011

Bill Maher is right. Be more cynical. If you think our government is still a democracy in its purest sense, you don't know Jack. If you believe our politicians serve their constituents with sound moral compasses, you simply haven't been paying attention.

In some cases, they don't serve them at all. Pay to play, baby. Meet Tom DeLay, your worst nightmare. Back when he was in office, the former majority leader from Texas had the bright idea of turning our government over to market forces, and in the documentary "Casino Jack: T.

U.S.O.M.", DeLay makes it perfectly clear that he would do it all over again, even though free enterprise, synonymous with capitalism, is responsible for what currently ails our country, still reeling from the unprecedented collapse of its financial institutions.

When DeLay deregulated campaign financing(what one analyst describes as "legalized bribery"), he opened up Pandora's Box, setting the stage for the G.-L.-B. Act which turned our banks into gambling halls.

In the non-fictionalized account of super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, DeLay looked straight into the camera's eye and lied through his teeth, brazenly declaring, evidence to the contrary, that he treated the convicted felon no differently from any other special interest advocate.

Taking its cues from the Alex Gibney documentary, "Casino Jack" shows without the shadow of a doubt that the self-proclaimed "deregulation nut" knew Abramoff. On a trip to the Mariana Islands, home of a thriving garment industry that Abramoff had protected from outside intervention, DeLay says, "These people seem happy," while inspecting a factory, a seeming extension of American-style democracy.

It's not until we're back stateside during a K. Street party that we learn, through a reporter's question posed to Jack, about the island factories being described as "sweat shops and rape camps" by watchdog groups speaking on behalf of the low-paid workforce.

Although the film isn't called "Island Jack", what Abramoff concocted and unleashed upon this Pacific chain deserves a film of its own, and more importantly, the fallout shouldn't be short-shrifted with a single line as being the final word on the human rights violation matter.

Like DeLay, "Casino Jack" itself avoids any contact with the indentured seamstresses, as if the filmmaker too was bought off with Abramoff's hush money. As a result of the film choosing not to document the systemic abuse that ran rampantly through these textile-based dictatorships, "Casino Jack" could remain an amiable comedy, perhaps out of an affinity for Jason Reitman's "Thank You For Smoking", another film that didn't fully actualize the ramifications of a lobbyist's handiwork.

The filmmaker wouldn't be able to get away with humanizing Abramoff had he depicted an instance of employer/employee rape. This is not a John Sayles film, or Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation".

In the 2009 doc, we hear the story about a factory worker trying to sell his kidney as a means of returning home, but even this highly-touted film draws the line at hammering a death nail in Abramoff's public image, since it leaves out the report that the lobbyist helped write a Texas congressman's speech which attacked the credibility of a Marianan teen sex worker's testimony about her island holiday.

Like the documentary, "Casino Jack" has a sense of fair play, but here's the rub: this Harvard-trained former Young Republican is not a fair man, and shouldn't be accorded any special considerations.

Back in the day, he and DeLay forged a friendship that would result in the two men irrevocably laying waste to the principles of our founding fathers. The "Gimme Five" scheme that Jack and his right-hand man Michael Scanlon hatched and implemented like corporate cowboys upon the casino-owning Indian tribes was unscrupulous and certainly deserves its allotted screen time, but unlike the Chippewa elders who owned multi-million businesses, the Southeast Asian immigrants had nothing.

Instead of their plaintive cries, we hear Ms. Abramoff's anguished sobs, and Jack musing aloud, "I let down God," without a trace of satirical self-awareness. The film likes him. That's why "Casino Jack" fails to fully indict Jack as a villain.

We don't need a fair and balanced film about a sociopath. There's still too many uncynical babes in the woods out there. Unlike Hustler publisher Larry Flint, who admits he's the worst, due to the abetment of the film's relatively positivistic spin on the lobbyist's persona, Abramoff can't do the same, when he surreptitiously passes off the blame to the system in a protracted daydream at his senate panel hearing, where he bursts into Al Pacino-like theatrics, screaming, "You're out of order," like in Norman Jewison's "And Justice For All".

In his twisted mind, Abramoff fancies himself as a folk hero.