Movie Review: 'Wag the Dog' (1997)

In Barry Levinson’s 1997 political satire Wag the Dog, actors Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Anne Heche make covering presidential scandal with patriotic frenzy look like a walk in the park. The movie mixes Hollywood and politics into a satirical comedy with issues that hit close to home during the time it was produced and filmed.

In the movie, a United States president is caught red-handed when he is discovered in an illicit scandal with an underage “Firefly Girl” in the anteroom of the Oval Office.

With election day on the horizon and determined to keep Mr. President around for another term, officials make plans to divert the public and press from the scandal.

Anne Heche plays the desperate government aide Winifred Ames, who leads De Niro’s Conrad Brean into the underground bunkers below the White House. Then comes the outrageous Hollywood producer Stanley Motss, played by Dustin Hoffman.

Playing a Mr. Fixit poker-faced character named Conrad Brean, De Niro is cool-headed and knows how to cook-up one lie to make another problem seem far less troublesome.

De Niro is far from the antagonistic and vicious Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas in this role, but he has certainly got the shady genius with an almost wise-guy ingenuity.

What is this wise-guy’s motto? “To change the story, change the lead.”

So, what exactly is this new lead? Why, it is a war with Albania, of course!

“Why Albania?” Heche’s character asks.

“Why not?” De Niro says.

In the movie, it is a country most people have never heard of nor one which they really care about, except maybe for the Belushi brothers. There is not actually a war with Albania but the American people are smoothly coerced into patriotism. Standing up for their country instead of finding out their president has been involved in a shock-worthy sex scandal just two weeks before reelection is to take place.

It is almost unsettelingly creepy just how silly, yet completely believable, the content of the film is.

Director Levinson shows just how easy it is to make a whole country swirl and rise in a pot of political lies. Despite the seriousness of the content, he manages to make the movie laugh-worthy, being satirical at the right moments and thoughtful at others.

Especially the country singer character of Johnny Green, played by Willie Nelson, who looks like he belongs at a rodeo instead of conducting a choir and frankly stating that he would rather be getting drunk than writing the lyrics to what would be an anthem for heroism: “Good Old Shoe.”

Hoffman, as the insecure movie producer Stanley Motss, shows his skill for finger-snapping and quick thinking. His plots get more and more ridiculous as the film goes on, whether he’s demanding a calico kitten or putting the President on hold.

His casual treatment when it comes to politics is in the way he shrugs at the idea of payment in the form of an ambassadorship. “Ambassador to what?” he asks. “I don’t even like going to Brentwood.”

This is certainly not the seriousness of his genius role in Rain Man or the workaholic Ted Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer.

Heche, as the presidential aide Winifred Ames, is high-powered, ambitious, and motor-mouthed. Though she is a bit out-shined by the big-named acting legacies of De Niro and Hoffman, she proves she can act with the best of them in her role between the two men.

In their respective roles, De Niro, Heche, and Hoffman perform a government manipulation which contains enough realistic instances to make one wonder how many times their government has manipulated them.