I sometimes think both living in Washington and covering both federal agencies and Congress has given me a much lower tolerance for movies about real and fictional Washington figures. There are exceptions, of course, Breach is a tremendous, tremendously smart movie about bureaucracy, sacrifice in the name of career, and sociopathy, and I love it for all of those things. But Casino Jack? This looks kind of awful:
The backslapping corruption of it really doesn't capture the extent to which Abramoff was the logical end point of an era and a set of practices; having a single Wise Native Person around doesn't particularly capture the extent to which Abramoff bilked the tribes he and his associates represented (nor does it make for a reasoned discussion of the debate over gambling on tribal lands); and the movie doesn't look like, at least, it gets into the noxious foreign governments Abramoff represented. Even if he'd never committed crimes, even if a lot of his dreams weren't built on foundations of air, the guy wouldn't have been a gee-whiz paragon. It's a lot more honorable to be working at a (reportedly terrific) kosher pizza place than to represent governments who commit genocide or who provide gross and abusive harbors from labor laws. The tone of this feels unpleasant to me, and I don't think I'll watch it.