Casino Jack is a consistently amusing biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the manic, bull-necked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who recently spent three and a half years in prison for, as far as I can tell, running a little more amok than is considered seemly among Washington insiders.
As Abramoff brushes his teeth in the opening scene, he pumps himself up for a long day of throwing his weight around with his own personal 1980s action-movie catchphrase: “I am Jack Abramoff and, oh yeah, I work out every day.” When Abramoff escorts his Indian-chief clients in eagle-feather headdresses into the Oval Office, George W. Bush greets him with, “Hey, Buff Guy, what are you benching?”
Granted, a timelier movie could have been made about, say, Tony Rezko, the current president’s old friend and fundraiser, who is still being held in an undisclosed location awaiting sentencing. A half-decade ago, the press thoroughly covered Abramoff’s career of fleecing crooked Indian tribes to fund a sniper school for West Bank settlers. In contrast, the Chicago Democratic operative’s similarly wacky life (as the business brains behind the Nation of Islam, Rezko managed the Black Muslims’ most famous convert, Muhammad Ali) remains almost unknown due to the media’s aversion to mentioning anything interesting about Barack Obama’s background.
Still, Casino Jack offers a lighthearted but vivid portrait of the species Homo conman politicus.
A stage actor of superb vocal facility, Spacey became a movie star in the 1990s by playing villains, monsters, and antiheroes in The Usual Suspects, Seven, and American Beauty. But he’s not actually a deep, dark character. Spacey is more an energetic showman who wants to make audiences happy. Hence, a decade ago when he finally became able to make movies he likes, he quickly wrecked his film career by starring in sappy stories such as his silly (but often show-stopping) labor of love, the 2004 Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea.
Democrats are disappointed that Spacey doesn’t play Abramoff as the locus of all evil, the second coming of Keyser Söze. Instead, Spacey empathetically portrays Abramoff as someone much like himself, an ingratiating Hollywood hustler who can’t resist doing impressions of his favorite movie stars.
The son of a Beverly Hills marketing executive, Abramoff became an Orthodox Jew at age 12 after seeing Fiddler on the Roof. A jock at Beverly Hills High, he was acclaimed for his relentlessness in the weight room. Abramoff then teamed with Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed to take over the College Republicans, after which he organized a fan club for beefy Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi.
As Hollywood’s drug of choice morphed from cocaine to anabolic steroids, Abramoff went home to co-write and produce the 1989 movie Red Scorpion, in which Dolph Lundgren (Ivan Drago in Rocky IV) played a Soviet agent in Africa who turns anti-communist and teams up with a Savimbi-like freedom fighter.
After 1994’s GOP sweep, Abramoff was hired by Preston Gates & Ellis, a Democratic-leaning Washington establishment law and lobbying firm. (The “Gates” is Bill Gates Sr.) Abramoff brought in more vibrant sorts of clients such as the North Mariana Islands, a U.S. dependency that needed GOP House Whip Tom DeLay’s help in keeping its immigration scam going.
Both Rezko and Abramoff found the diversity racket to be easy money. Yet Rezko is neither black nor Muslim; he’s a Syrian Christian. Rezko used Jabir Muhammad, son of Elijah Muhammad (who presumably had Obama’s boyhood hero Malcolm X assassinated in 1965), as his front man to win minority set-aside contracts.
And Abramoff is—most likely—neither Native American nor Micronesian.
Seven Indian gaming tribes paid Abramoff $85 million to bribe Congress into denying casinos to rival neighboring tribes. But only a little went into politicians’ pockets. Abramoff instead routed casino money to Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, to gin up an Astroturf anti-gambling campaign to scare the Indians into increasing Abramoff’s retainer.
Abramoff sluiced much Indian wampum into his increasingly grandiose and delusional philanthropies, such as buying two giant Zamboni machines to smooth the ice on the hockey rink he never quite got around to building at the Jewish boys’ boarding school he’d founded.
The phrase “performance-enhancing drugs” doesn’t come up much in Casino Jack, but the simplest explanation for Abramoff’s over-the-topness may be that he was out of his head on steroids.
The pudgy Spacey, however, does not work out every day, so his performance, while verbally brilliant, lacks the visceral impact expected in today’s shape-shifting Hollywood. Unlike, say, Natalie Portman in The Black Swan or Christian Bale in The Fighter, Spacey hasn’t contorted his body and risked his health in hopes of an Oscar. I have a hard time holding that against him.
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