This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie. The story is probably familiar so I'll just summarize it. The president of the USA gets caught having sex with a teenage Firefly Girl and DeNiro and Heche hire Dustin Hoffman, an old Hollywood hand, to produce a distracting event, like a war with Albania, to flood the media and distract the public's attention for long enough (11 days) for the president to be reelected.
One thing after another goes wrong and each time Hoffman comes up with yet another colorful lie to extend the life of the story. The CIA publicly ends the war prematurely? No problem. "This is NOTHING!" cries Hoffman, "You ought to try shooting 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' when two of the four horseman die two weeks after the beginning of principal photography!" No war? No problem. Hoffman invents a hero who was left behind in an Albanian prison camp. "Every war has a hero." The man chosen to be the hero -- Woody Harrelson -- turns out to have spent the last twelve years in a military prison for raping a nun. Lies are piled upon lies.
We all know that political spin is put on everything that happens in Washington. This movie came out in 1997 during Clinton's presidency but he never started a war to deflect criticism. And yet the way Levinson has directed it, and the way the performers attack their roles, it is almost completely believable that deceptions like this take place. Hoffman stretches his acting a bit but he is never so hammy that he is unbelievable as a Hollywood producer. "Ramon, bring me my veggie shake now." And, "They told me I couldn't make 'Moby Dick' from the point of view of the whale!" He brings to the part some of the smooth-talking duplicity that he showed in "Papillon" and "Midnight Cowboy." He glows with self satisfaction as he spells out his accomplishments to DeNiro. "This is the greatest thing I've ever done, bringing this war to a satisfactory conclusion." DeNiro: "But there was no war." Hoffman: "That makes it all the more difficult." Nobody else is in the least bit over the top. They play it the way Levinson directs it, as a realistic straightforward story. None of the actors seems to know that he or she is in a comedy and it works very well.
I don't think I'll mention any more of the gags because I don't want to spoil it. But it's hard to forget the scene near the end of the film when Hoffman is looking out the window at the funeral of Harrelson's character. Huge American flags, the casket being carried by the "men of the 303" (invented for the occasion). Hoffman spreads his arms expansively and says to DeNiro -- "Look at it. The whole thing is a ******* fraud, and yet it's 100 percent honest!" A victim of his own egotism, Hoffman decides that he wants credit for the production and is perfunctorily disposed of, having "suffered a massive heart attack poolside."
This was probably a funnier movie when it first appeared. President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp and all that. A war built on a string of lies seemed so outrageous that it was impossible to take a movie like this seriously. Well, circumstances change. The movie is still a great success but my heart sank at the sight of the flag-draped coffin returning from "Albania." The story seems equally outrageous now, but in a very different sense of the word.
One thing after another goes wrong and each time Hoffman comes up with yet another colorful lie to extend the life of the story. The CIA publicly ends the war prematurely? No problem. "This is NOTHING!" cries Hoffman, "You ought to try shooting 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' when two of the four horseman die two weeks after the beginning of principal photography!" No war? No problem. Hoffman invents a hero who was left behind in an Albanian prison camp. "Every war has a hero." The man chosen to be the hero -- Woody Harrelson -- turns out to have spent the last twelve years in a military prison for raping a nun. Lies are piled upon lies.
We all know that political spin is put on everything that happens in Washington. This movie came out in 1997 during Clinton's presidency but he never started a war to deflect criticism. And yet the way Levinson has directed it, and the way the performers attack their roles, it is almost completely believable that deceptions like this take place. Hoffman stretches his acting a bit but he is never so hammy that he is unbelievable as a Hollywood producer. "Ramon, bring me my veggie shake now." And, "They told me I couldn't make 'Moby Dick' from the point of view of the whale!" He brings to the part some of the smooth-talking duplicity that he showed in "Papillon" and "Midnight Cowboy." He glows with self satisfaction as he spells out his accomplishments to DeNiro. "This is the greatest thing I've ever done, bringing this war to a satisfactory conclusion." DeNiro: "But there was no war." Hoffman: "That makes it all the more difficult." Nobody else is in the least bit over the top. They play it the way Levinson directs it, as a realistic straightforward story. None of the actors seems to know that he or she is in a comedy and it works very well.
I don't think I'll mention any more of the gags because I don't want to spoil it. But it's hard to forget the scene near the end of the film when Hoffman is looking out the window at the funeral of Harrelson's character. Huge American flags, the casket being carried by the "men of the 303" (invented for the occasion). Hoffman spreads his arms expansively and says to DeNiro -- "Look at it. The whole thing is a ******* fraud, and yet it's 100 percent honest!" A victim of his own egotism, Hoffman decides that he wants credit for the production and is perfunctorily disposed of, having "suffered a massive heart attack poolside."
This was probably a funnier movie when it first appeared. President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp and all that. A war built on a string of lies seemed so outrageous that it was impossible to take a movie like this seriously. Well, circumstances change. The movie is still a great success but my heart sank at the sight of the flag-draped coffin returning from "Albania." The story seems equally outrageous now, but in a very different sense of the word.