Wag the Dog (1997)

I personally don't like the news. All news just takes stories and negatively embellishes the heck out of them. Wag The Dog somewhat supports my theory but it really shows how the news can fake things just to make themselves look good. Although the movie is about the news, it's very concept can apply to all forms of mass media.

Wag the Dog is a political satire. It's whole point is to show how manipulative media is and how gullible the public is. Barry Levinson has a knack for making feel-good movies, so there's nothing too outrageous. The movie is about the President of the US who has sexual misconduct with an underage girl and breaks into the public two weeks before election. We never do see or hear him. Excellent move by Barry Levinson. De Niro plays a spin doctor who is determined to make the President look like a hero by creating a fictitious war with Albania. Why Albania? Albania is a very tiny country who many people have not heard of. De Niro gets a Hollywood producer (Hoffman) to help create the war by using fake stories and fake footage. The public buys it all. While watching this, keep in mind that the movie is a satire. Kirsten Dunst is an actress who plays an Albanian victim in a battleground in the phony newsreel. Wouldn't her parents think: "That girl looks exactly like my daughter"? Wouldn't headlines break about Albania's proof of denial of the whole war? As a satire, no. The movie's main focus is to make you laugh. Sure it is unrealistic, but that is where my mention of gullibility ties in. The stories are convincing, the footage looks real as can be, it is the biggest story in the country, so why not believe it? The movie puts everything in perspective by having a wild crew make every little thing convincing.

Make a Top 10 list of Hoffman and De Niro performances and movies, Wag the Dog would appear on all of them. Hoffman was nominated for an Oscar for his role as a smooth-sailing, flamboyant producer. De Niro (who I found to be just as good as Hoffman) plays a cocky spin doctor who is very admirable. Both guys are very funny. It is also funny to see just how realistic and possible Wag the Dog is. Who's to say fakeness isn't used to cover things up? This was released one month before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Anybody that knows that scandal could see the connection between that and this movie.

If I could change anything in this film, I would increase the clarity from Albania's side and add more to the news footage. Other than that, the movie is very real and gets you thinking. What is real and what is fake? How smart are we?

3.5/4

Fmovies: I could watch this movie over and over. The movie is almost than 20 years old and yet it rings true today, although the political outrages of the day that it satirizes seem tame compared to what has transpired in reality since.

Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro deliver priceless performances. Anne Heche ties them together. Willie Nelson, Woody Harrelson provide perfect accents with their smaller roles.

The movie serves up some memorable lines and situations indelible on your memory.

It's just too bad we don't seem to have learned anything from its lesson.

Hollywood is sometimes able to produce satirical films that, in retrospect, appear to predict future developments in American politics. `Being There', the story of a simple man whose homespun philosophy is taken for profound wisdom and who, as a result, becomes a candidate for President, may look like a satire on the Reagan administration, but in fact it was actually released in 1979, during the Carter years. `Dave', which features a womanising President called Bill whose marriage is in trouble because of his adulterous relationships and his trimming of his radical principles, came out in 1993, just after Bill Clinton had taken office. It must, however, have been planned well in advance and was presumably not actually intended as anti-Clinton satire, but that is how it tends to come across today.

`Wag the Dog' is another film that proves to have been unintentionally prophetic. Shortly before an election, the President is embroiled in a potentially explosive sex scandal which threatens to end his presidency in disgrace. In order to distract the public's attention, his advisers concoct a wholly fictitious military crisis in the Balkans and hire a Hollywood producer to provide the necessary harrowing footage of war scenes. When the Albanian government protest that their country is not in fact at war, the aides present this as a triumph of American diplomacy that has averted the threatened crisis, and, in order to keep the affair in the public's mind, concoct a further sub-plot involving a supposed military hero (in real life a convicted rapist in a military prison) held prisoner by a rebel faction.

All of this may seem very familiar, but bear in mind that this film was made in 1997, two years before President Clinton, faced with a potentially explosive sex scandal which for a time threatened to end his presidency in disgrace, took America to war over a crisis in the Balkans. At least he didn't need to concoct a fictitious war. The parallels with the more recent Iraq war are perhaps less exact, although the scenes involving the supposed hero `Old Shoe' were strongly reminiscent of the ballyhoo surrounding Private Jessica Lynch.

Like `Being There', `Wag the Dog' is not, of course, a work of social realism. In real life, a simpleton like Chance could not become President without being found out, and no administration could actually get away with inventing a bogus war. (That's why they have to provide real ones). In order to make a satirical point, both films exaggerate prevalent tendencies in modern political life. `Being There', among other things, is about self-deception- Chance never pretends to be anything he is not, but those around him deceive themselves by seeing him as what they want him to be. `Wag the Dog', on the other hand, is about political `spin' and the deliberate deception of the public. Politicians try and deceive as many of the people for as much of the time as they think they can get away with, and the media will go along with such deception for as long as it is in their interest.

`Wag the Dog' has some sharp points to make, and there is a very good performance from Dustin Hoffman as the Hollywood producer Stanley Motss. Motss is recognisably suffering from status anxiety in its most acute form- the form that afflicts the brilliantly successful and wealthy man who still feels undervalued by society and will do anything, however unethical or even dangerous to his own safety, to win public recognition. (He complains that there is

Wag the Dog fmovies. Wag the Dog is a brilliant satire of the American political system with enough realism to make it plausible. It speaks the strongest to people who already have a visceral loathing of the American democratic process (not how it was in 1789 but how it is now). They see a degraded and ignorant public easily duped by politicians who are no more than habitual liars who will say anything to get elected but lack any idealism whatsoever. Intelligent, funny, but also very depressing, 9/10.

It had been a while since I last watched this film, but I once again remembered the reasons why I loved it so. Thoughtful and evocative, this film really captured the nature of politics and spin doctoring. This certainly ranks as one of the best political comedies of all time. The over-the-top attitude of the film didn't detract from anything, making this still quite believable. It also demonstrated how people's emotions can be manipulated when aggressively attacked. The fragile nature of the human spirit tends to make us more susceptible to such manipulations, as demonstrated in this film. With the exception of Anne Heche, everyone's performance in this film was rather good. The only other downside was Mark Knopfler's score, which was completely out of place in this film.

I do not understand the people who did not like the movie. For me this is the greatest political satire since Chaplin's "The great dictator". Both de Niro and Hoffman are great as well. This movie is not about Clinton although they did predict correctly the Kosovo war, and Albanian terrorists. It is about American political system which is made by and for TV. Several lines from that movie ("Why Albania?" - "Why not?", "Albania does not rhyme", "What do you remember about the Gulf war? One smart bomb... I was in that building when we shot that shot", and many more) are impossible to forget because everyday political life does not let us forget them.