Barry Levinson's Beloved 1997 Dark Comedy Wag the Dog is an Eternally Relevant Satire

Some movies transcend the particular cultural moment that created them, like Barry Levinson’s bracingly tart 1997 political satire Wag the Dog. The film was a pronounced critical and commercial success at the time of its release, when its satirical tale of a desperate President who fakes an international crisis to distract attention from a humiliating sex scandal eerily echoed then-President Bill Clinton bombing Sudan in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky kerfuffle. It was a box-office hit and snagged Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman) and Best Screenplay (David Mamet and Hilary Henkin).

The cult hit adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel was rightly hailed for its timeliness and relevance when it came out. It’s never stopped being praised for its spooky prescience. We’ve never stopped talking about Wag the Dog. The movie’s breezy slightness is at once one of its greatest strengths and a pronounced weakness. Yet the dark comedy has nevertheless become one of those movies that just seems to get bigger and more important with time, like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy or Albert Brooks’ Real Life.

Pundits have never stopped invoking Wag the Dog when powerful men use military misdirection to distract the public from their personal and sexual failings. This article could run any time in the next fifty years and it would still probably seem to eerily echo a recent high profile political scandal.

We never see the face of the scandal-and-rumor-besieged President in Wag the Dog. We don’t need to. He’s purposefully depicted as an abstraction, a sentient crisis and a problem that needs to be solved more than as a leader or a human being.

The crisis stems from news reports mere days before an election that the sitting President committed horrific sexual transgressions with the underage member of a Girl Scouts-like troop that visited the White House and got decidedly more than they bargained for.

With the President terrified of blowing a huge lead less than two weeks before the election, he procures the valuable and exceedingly expensive services of Conrad Brean, who a terrific, pre-sleepwalking (but post-Sleepers) Robert De Niro plays as a cross between black-hearted but ferociously effective Republican operative Lee Atwater (who figures prominently in the novel that loosely inspired the film) and Monroe Stahhr, the Irving Thalberg-like movie producer he played in previous Fractured Mirror entry The Last Tycoon.

Like Stahrr, Brean quietly but masterfully takes control of every situation through a singular combination of guile, intelligence and self-control.

An old pro like the actor playing him, Brean comes to legendary producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) with an unusual proposal with some equally unique restrictions. The savvy old player wants the Hollywood big shot to produce not a war movie but something weirdly analogous: a fake war, or at least scenes and images from a wholly fabricated international incident that will distract the American people and press from the sex scandal until the Pervert-in-Chief is safely re-elected.

Brean wisely plays to Motss’ enormous ego. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to single-handedly help determine the fate of Western democracy, to produce something on a level he never could have possibly have imagined, not just make another movie.

Hoffman plays Motss as his good friend Robert Evans, the actor-turned-studio-head-turned-producer-turned-raconteur as legendary for his exquisite second life as the glamorous soul and golden voice behind the all-time great Hollywood tell-all The Kid Stays in the Picture and its even more legendary audio-book.

Wag the Dog is a perverse valentine to the magic and necessity of putting on a show, even if the purpose of the show is to undermine democracy and get the public to ignore the woeful sexual transgressions of its most powerful leader, as it is here. It’s like a blackly comic, Swiftian variation on a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musical, but about ominous figures working furtively behind the scenes instead of fresh-faced kids.

The genius of Hoffman’s performance is that it’s fueled by love and affection rather than anger. Hoffman’s love for Evans comes through in every line, every tic, every mannerism. He’s a comic figure, of course, vain, narcissistic, overflowing with rambling anecdotes from his decades in show-business, a very small minority of which might actually be true, and obsessed with his reputation and standing in Hollywood.

Yet the seductive old dinosaur is also very good at what he does, if not the very best. The palpable joy and satisfaction he derives from his flimflammery goes a long way towards undercutting the film’s sometimes suffocating cynicism.

Like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off, Wag the Dog captures two icons just before they devolved into lazy self-caricature. De Niro has spent the past few decades doing embarrassingly hammy comic variations on his trademark tough guy routine while Hoffman seems content to play elfin man-sprites in abominations like The Tailor  and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium and, of course, Little Fockers and Meet the Fockers, which re-teamed him with De Niro.

By the time they reunited for the sake of huge paydays in the Meet the Parents sequels, De Niro and Hoffman were reduced to doing shtick but in Wag the Dog they were still committed to acting rather than self-caricature.

It’s a measure of the film’s profound cynicism that it doesn’t matter to the movie or any of its characters whether or not the President should be re-elected. Nothing about him inspires confidence. The strongest argument his campaign commercials can muster is that it’d be a big hassle to have a different President (the logistics involving moving all that crap in and out of the White House alone are almost too overwhelming to even contemplate) so you might as well stick with the man who already has the job.

At no point do any of the characters have a crisis of conscience over whether they’re doing the right thing by faking an international crisis in Albania as a smokescreen to get a sex criminal re-elected. All that matters to them is that they have a job to do, and that job is to get the President re-elected, so that’s their exclusive focus, not whether he should be re-elected.

Since Motss is based on Robert Evans, his fate is effectively sealed when Brean cautions the legendary storyteller that one of the conditions of this peculiar mission manufacturing a war for the American President is that he can’t ever tell anybody about what he’s done. You can’t tell an Evans-like yarn-spinner, who lives to tell stories, the wilder and more preposterous-seeming the better, that he cannot tell the best and most outrageous anecdote of his amazing and outrageous, larger-than-life existence. His ego simply won’t allow for it.

Wag the Dog is scathing and insightful in its portrayal of the way patriotism is shamelessly exploited to sell dubious campaigns, military and otherwise, and the emotions of the American people are manipulated to trick them into embracing eternal warfare. Wag the Dog is far from the first satire to depict show business and warfare as inextricably intertwined and war as a product launch sold to the public the same way you would a new laundry detergent or smartphone.

Wag the Dog is very funny and very mean but also unrelentingly glib, a movie that, like its characters, doesn’t seem to believe in anything beyond the old-fashioned satisfaction of putting on a show and a job well done.

Mamet’s script is an eminently quotable delight but it’s ultimately the film’s cockeyed affection for storytelling and myth-making in all of its forms that makes it emotionally resonant in addition to eternally relevant and timely.

Wag the Dog occasionally addresses the perpetually pertinent question, what exactly is it that a producer does?

When the producer is a man-God at the level of a Robert Evans, Irving Thahlberg or Stanley Motss, the answer is that they make magic happen.

Is Wag the Dog, for all of its glibness, cynicism and superficiality, touched by that magic?

As a great man and producer might say, you bet your sweet ass it is!

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