Among the things we find out about Jack Abramoff (Kevin Spacey) in “Casino Jack,†the most curious is the stint he had as a Hollywood producer, a job where the best perk was getting to work with Dolph Lundgen. You can see why Abramoff’s career in movies never took off, but the funny thing about him going on to be the most amoral lobbyist Washington ever saw is that he pretty much wrote the script for his own biopic, one that’s not necessarily stranger than fiction but still profound enough that no one could’ve made it up. Although everybody got to see the bad guy get what was coming to him, you wouldn’t describe his story as the feel-good hit of the year.
The film approaches Abramoff’s image from the outside in, beginning with a “Hi, I’m the Villain†monologue that’s befitting for a guy with his reputation. He’s facing charges of defrauding clients out of millions, and although some biopics make characters more relatable by having the bad ones seem as if they fell in with the wrong crowd, this one shows a man as venal when he started out as the day he landed in jail.
Not that he was the only one who got his hands dirty. Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper) was a glorified errand boy who paid such careful attention to the goings-on that he learned more secrets than Abramoff would’ve liked, and their gormless mobster buddy (Jon Lovitz) got so caught up in drugs and prostitutes that he didn’t know the trouble he stirred up until it was too late. With friends like these…
Their dealings with foreign sweatshops and Indian casinos escape the notice of Abramoff’s wife (Kelly Preston) and Scanlon’s girlfriend (Rachelle Lefevre), whose relationships with them give us an idea of how different both men are. The time the film devotes to these women is relatively short, which goes to show how much their relationships mattered to them.
Preston and Lefevre make the most of their screen time, though, and while the movie doesn’t focus very long on the reasons for Scanlon’s girlfriend turning against him, Lefevre gives her decision the quiet satisfaction it deserves. As for Pepper, his preppy-like demeanor makes Scanlon seem as if he were born ready to sleaze his way to the top, even if it means betraying confidants who help him get there.
It goes without saying that a great deal of the movie’s effect depends on Spacey, and Norman Snider’s quotable script is at its most powerful in his hands. Our view of who Abramoff is in real life allows Spacey to play it big, but he shows us that Abramoff didn’t get where he was by coming across as a short-tempered mercenary, and instead spends most of the film as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Besides, with everything Abramoff did to get his well-deserved prison sentence, Spacey knows he can let his actions speak for themselves.
This article originally appeared on AllMediaNY.com
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