Wag The Dog
Starring Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman
Directed by Barry Levinson
Review by Dave Riley
If you believe that allegations of sexual misconduct by a US president is a reasonable excuse for war on Iraq to distract people from the scandal, then it's time you owned up to your cynicism. That many people do believe that Clinton's plans to bomb Baghdad, although temporarily frustrated, have been generated for this reason, indicate how pandemic this cynicism is.
It's hard to imagine how such a sick joke can be turned into a workable routine. Logically then, the plot of Wag The Dog is simply too uncanny to warrant laughter. A president facing allegations of sexual misconduct starts a mock war with Albania in order to increase his chances of re-election.
Too close for comfort? Life imitating art? It may seem so except for one significant detail. The recent history of US military activity is precisely the opposite. The wars of the last 30 years waged by successive US administrations have been dominated by a preference for secrecy. President Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia brutally and relentlessly without telling a soul about it beforehand. Of course, the locals were in on the secret.
This trend — surely a policy — usually fosters movie making preoccupied with the clandestine activities of the CIA. Rambo notwithstanding, it's usually paranoia rather than patriotism which Hollywood prefers to utilise for plot development in the post-Vietnam decades.
So where did this movie come from? While Hollywood has been actively demonising Arabs as terrorists for most of the '90s, actual all-out warfare has generally been focused on alien life forms such as those mean crustacean invaders of planet earth who got their rear appendages whipped in Independence Day. The New World Order, sponsored by the UN (US?), may be ever ready against cockroaches from outer space, but turning on our own kind isn't quite Hollywood. Not yet anyway.
Instead we are treated to a flick about how the images of war — and in Wag The Dog that's all they are — are manipulated.
Nonetheless, Wag scrubs up as a cynic's delight. Eleven days before the election, news is about to break that the president has had carnal knowledge of a girl scout in the Oval Office. In order to distract the public and win the election, the president calls in a shadowy fixer, Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) who, with the help of Hollywood producer Stanley Motts (Dustin Hoffman), decides to stage a nice little war.
While playing to the Hollywood cliche of a government conspiracy, Wag the Dog's major success is its ability to pursue the wonderful logic of the project to hand. With no crusading journalists or nosy heroes trying to thwart the scheme and wake America up to the conspiracy, it soon settles into a story about the manipulation of taste and opinion.
Many critics have hailed Wag the Dog as a stinging satire — comparable to Dr Strangelove and the more recent Bob Roberts — but there seems to be a vital element missing from this film: outrage. Since we're "in" on the joke perpetrated by the conspirators, we are forced to share in the film's major premise: "A dog wags its tail because the dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smart, it would wag the dog."
With Brean and Motts as accredited professional dog-waggers, their ready success in manufacturing reality relies on the assumption that the rest of us must be pretty damned stupid to go along with it.
While Wag the Dog sometimes soars with frequent tight scripting and absurd comic situations, in the end it sours rather than satirises. In the end, this film's joke is on us.