The first press screening of the film at the Toronto International Film Festival was witnessed in a sort of stunned silence by a capacity audience, interrupted slightly by an undercurrent of incredulous murmurs and soft laughter when Spacey, as Abramoff, in a fantasy sequence, explodes at a Senate hearing chaired by McCain. He has been released on parole and just finished a stint working in a Baltimore pizza parlor.
It stars Kevin Spacey in an exact and not entirely unsympathetic performance as Abramoff, once one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, who was convicted on charges involving the funds he stole from wealthy Indian casinos while arranging laws for their convenience on Capitol Hill.
His film uses a fictional sledgehammer to attack the cozy love triangle involving lobbyists, lawmakers and money. This decision to name names by the director George Hickenlooper seems based on boldness, recklessness or perhaps iron-clad legal assurances. Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove, George W. The film is “inspired by real events,” and the characters in this film have the names of the people in those real events: Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, Rep. “Casino Jack” is so forthright, it is stunning. They drop broad hints that a character is “really” Dick Cheney or Bill Clinton and so on. Political movies often play cute in drawing parallels with actual figures.
