Wag the Dog (1997)

Official trailer

Wag the Dog is Barry Levinson’s 1997 American political satire. The film depicts political fixer Conrad Brean being summoned to fabricate a war that will distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal eleven days before the election. Brean recruits Hollywood producer Stanley Motss to stage the war through fake news footage, manufactured propaganda, and an invented Albanian terrorist threat.

Dustin Hoffman plays Motss. Robert De Niro plays Brean. Anne Heche plays presidential aide Winifred Ames. Denis Leary plays Fad King. Willie Nelson plays songwriter Johnny Dean.

Woody Harrelson plays Sergeant William Schumann. Hilary Henkin and David Mamet wrote the screenplay from Larry Beinhart’s 1993 novel American Hero. New Line Cinema produced the film on a budget of approximately 15 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 64 million dollars worldwide. The work received two Academy Award nominations.

Few satires make me laugh this hard and then feel this uneasy about it. Hoffman and De Niro play the whole con like two old pros having the time of their lives, and I’m right there enjoying it until I remember what they’re selling. That double feeling is what I want from satire.

The film is the strongest American political media satire of the late 1990s and the picture that set the wag the dog phrase in political discourse. It was released about three weeks before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and eight months before President Clinton ordered bombing strikes on Sudan during the same scandal. The coincidental timing made the film appear prescient about particular events it hadn’t been written to predict.

The Hoffman and De Niro central performances combine in a buddy comedy tone that the political satire used as cover for considerable criticism of American media manipulation. The Mamet dialogue makes the film’s argument. The result is a satire that anticipates the social media manipulation politics that would dominate later decades.

The Timing Coincidence

Wag the Dog opened December 25, 1997. The Lewinsky scandal broke on January 17, 1998. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan on August 20, 1998, three days after his grand jury testimony about Lewinsky. The strikes were officially in response to Al-Qaeda embassy bombings, but conservative commentators immediately invoked the film by name as describing what Clinton was doing. The phrase wag the dog entered American political vocabulary within months of the film’s release.

The coincidental timing produced effects the filmmakers didn’t anticipate. The film was suddenly being discussed as documentary about events occurring in real time.

Levinson and Mamet found themselves defending what they’d presented as satire against viewers who were treating it as analysis. Whether Clinton’s specific strikes constituted wag the dog operations remains debated. The phrase has continued in American political discourse for over two decades. The film acquired cultural standing exceeding what its quality alone would have generated through timing it couldn’t have planned.

I think the timing both helped and hurt it. The Lewinsky coincidence made the film famous, and it also buried a sharp comedy under years of people arguing about Clinton when they could’ve been enjoying the jokes.

Hoffman as Motss

Dustin Hoffman plays Stanley Motss as a Hollywood producer who treats the fabrication of a fake war as a creative challenge worthy of his professional pride. Hoffman reportedly based the performance on producer Robert Evans, though he denied direct caricature. Motss approaches the propaganda operation with the same enthusiasm he’d bring to producing a major motion picture. The character is principled about his profession even when his profession involves deceiving the American public.

The Academy nominated Hoffman for Best Actor for the performance, and he lost to Jack Nicholson for As Good as It Gets. The performance gives Motss an emotional core that the satirical material could have lacked.

Motss eventually demands credit for the fake war he produced. That leads to his elimination by the political operatives who needed the operation to remain anonymous. The character is destroyed by his own professional ego in ways that conventional villains in satirical political films typically aren’t. The performance carries moral weight the surrounding satire requires.

Hoffman is the reason this gets an 8 from me. Motss’s vanity is hilarious for most of the film and then suddenly it’s lethal, and his demand for credit is the moment the comedy turns cold on me.

The Mamet Dialogue

David Mamet rewrote the screenplay after Hilary Henkin’s original adaptation.

The Mamet dialogue makes the film’s argument through staccato rhythms, repetitions, and overlapping voices that conventional political satire doesn’t use. The shoe scene where De Niro discusses presidential approval ratings while standing in a hallway shows Mamet’s distinctive voice. Characters speak past each other while reaching agreement through implication instead of direct negotiation.

This lets the film deliver a lot of political analysis without sounding like a lecture. Information comes out of how characters talk to each other, and nobody stops to explain the situation to the audience. Hostile viewers could enjoy it as crime comedy while sympathetic ones got the argument. What delights me is how Mamet trusts the rhythm to make the point. I could listen to these two talk past each other for another hour.

Is Wag the Dog worth watching?

It’s an 8 from me because Hoffman, De Niro and Mamet turn a nasty idea into a political satire I enjoy every minute of, and the Lewinsky timing only sharpened the joke.

It isn’t higher because some of its fame belongs to the calendar, and the film’s quality alone wouldn’t have won all of it. Hoffman gives the fabrication real weight and the dialogue makes the argument without a single speech. Watch it if you care about political satire or media manipulation.

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