"Wag the Dog" is billed as "A comedy about truth, justice and other special effects," a tag line so dead-on accurate that a lengthy plot synopsis seems unnecessary.
All that we really need to know is the following: the president, caught having an affair with a young girl before election, is in dire need of a quick and effective political make-over. One of his assistants, Winifred Ames (Anne Heche), must work overtime to salvage his reputation.
Ames teams with sly foxes Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) and Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) to reconstruct the president's reputation, and the three invent a war with Albania to draw the country closer together and make the president a hero.
Seeing Ames, Motss and Brean team together to manufacture a nonexistent war is wickedly funny. The script, written by David Mamet and Hilary Henkin, is smart, merciless and frighteningly possible.
The wild strategies dreamed up by spin doctors Motss and Brean are so joyously wacky that audience involvement is inevitable. Some of the scenarios are priceless, especially the filming of fake war coverage depicting a young Albanian girl running for cover in her war-torn village.
The actress playing the Albanian (Kirsten Dunst) is made to hold a bag of Tortilla chips and run across a sound stage. Thanks to modern technology, however, the producers are able to replace the image of the chips with a white kitty and the empty blue sound stage becomes a fiery battlefield. "Anne Frank sirens" are added to this mix to create a perfect prime-time news moment.
The filmmakers also score with the brilliant wink-wink casting of Willie Nelson. Nelson is hired to create a slew of hideously cliched and corny "Voices that Care"-like war themes that change depending on whatever new events Motss and Brean concoct for their war.
As Motss, an eccentric, self-involved Hollywood producer, Hoffman reportedly lampoons Hollywood power-player Robert Evans more than a little bit. If assimilating some characteristics of a rich and famous man is necessary for Hoffman to turn in such an engaging and funny performance, then he should do it more often.
He seems more comfortable in the skin of this weasely producer than he has in any role in years, and he has not been this effortlessly funny since "Tootsie."
DeNiro is predictably good. This film allows him to sit back and relax a little bit, and he seems to be having a ball.
Perhaps what is most striking about the on-screen relationship between the two stars is the apparent lack of actorly competition.
Hoffman and DeNiro allow each other to turn in stellar performances without resorting to screaming matches or other histrionics to try to top each other. Think of Al Pacino's hammy, melodramatic turn in "Heat" and one can easily imagine how messy this pairing could have been.
Hoffman and DeNiro are not the only ones that shine. Anne Heche manages to hold her own despite an underdeveloped role, and Woody Harrelson registers strongly as William Schumann, a rapist who Motss and Brean recast as the requisite war hero for their fictional war.
While Harrelson's appearance in the last half hour of the film is welcome, his presence also signals an unfortunate shift in tone for the film.
Before his character appears on-screen the audience is hooked into Motss and Brean's amoral scheming to the point where we are really staring to root for their characters. Their hyper-creativity and ability to easily adapt to whatever situations that are thrown their way is mesmerizing. The scorn that they must possess for the American people who they expect to lap all of this up is not blatantly stated but strongly felt.
While it is impossible to say that the this film is benevolent in spirit, the mood is decidedly satirical until the end. The politically scathing script is certainly not ground-breaking, but it is awfully funny. The film takes a sharp turn towards black comedy during one of Harrelson's scenes, and it stays there for the remainder of the screen time.
The shift in tone seems intended to clue the audience in on a rather obvious "big statement" that had been previously unexpressed and would be better off left that way. While Motss and Brean may insult their audience, it is not necessary for director Barry Levinson ("Rain Man") to insult his.
Despite the downer ending, "Wag the Dog" is extremely engrossing and witty. Too bad Levinson did not leave well enough alone.
