The War To End All—

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 35
Barry Levinson (director), Wag the Dog

An unpopular and pathetically incompetent President needs a war, to distract America from his latest debacle. So his personal fixer does what any political operative naturally does: he phones Hollywood. There, a well-respected producer with political ambitions helps organize the illusion of a humanitarian crisis in Albania, which only America’s military might can solve. Suddenly, patriotism is popular, and the President’s ratings soar.

This 1997 movie has become associated with President Bill Clinton, who engaged the American military in 1997, 1998, and 1999 when sexual scandals threatened his administration. But it was written to satirize George HW Bush, who almost salvaged a flagging presidency by sending troops into Operation Desert Storm. Since its release, every single American President has, at least once, used military accomplishments to build popularity during sudden, violent controversy.

Spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) takes personal pride in his relationship with Hollywood. He boasts that Desert Storm’s most iconic image, a satellite-guided “smart bomb” flying down an exhaust chimney and striking a precise target, was faked using miniatures in a Falls Church, Virginia, studio. So when the President gets caught on tape soliciting an underage girl, presidential aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) calls Brean for an encore.

But Brean cannot accomplish this alone. He pulls strings and gets producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) into the operation. Motss’ connections secure him a photogenic young “war orphan,” played by ingenue Tracy Lime (Kirsten Dunst), whose apparent flight from her bombed-out village, kitten in hand, becomes nationwide news fodder. They masterfully hide that this “Albanian village” was constructed on greenscreen.

Brean warns Motss, Lime, and everyone involved, that their participation must remain completely secret. The slightest leak, he implies, will result in midnight assassinations by highly trained CIA operatives. Brean doesn’t realize, however, that CIA leakers have already sussed his ruse, and rushed oppo research to a highly popular Senator from the other party (Craig T. Nelson). Suddenly the fake war becomes a proxy for a bitterly controversial reëlection campaign.

Everything so far might conceal one important fact: this movie is a comedy. The humor is subtle and incisive, sometimes specifically targeted at events unfolding in the 1990s. Its understated, dry style, which amuses without necessarily causing laughs, reflects the influence of screenwriter David Mamet. (Mamet shares billing with first-draft author Hilary Henkin, but Mamet wrote Levinson’s final shooting script.) Maybe the wit is dry. Or maybe it’s too precise.

Robert De Niro, Anne Heche, and Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog

Brean, Ames, and Motss struggle to maintain the illusion of overseas involvement because they believe their President’s statements of principle. But believing the President’s words often means overlooking his actions. Their President is clearly a sexual predator more intent on maintaining power than governing responsibly. Yet his operatives believe, by keeping him aloft, they can accomplish their goals—which they never discuss, and so maybe don’t agree on.

This story builds upon the principle that Presidents love war. Given the Constitutional balance of powers, one could persuasively argue that, during peacetime, Presidents matter less to ordinary Americans than do Chairs of the Federal Reserve. But wars give everyone shared goals to build towards, something FDR discovered during World War II. Perhaps that’s why America has been engaged in an undeclared shooting conflict with someone, somewhere, continuously since 1947.

Unable to control the war narrative, our trio of weary antiheroes shifts to tubthumping about a POW supposedly left behind enemy lines. Wow, shades of Bowe Bergdahl. They organize an astroturf campaign to rescue Sgt. Schumann (Woody Harrelson), played by a soldier selected from headshots. But their fake POW proves impossible to control, and threatens to become a bigger PR nightmare than the war. Faking the news may be harder than making it.

Levinson directed this movie before social media, “fake news,” and “deepfake” videos became headline-grabbing concepts. He couldn’t possibly know the horrific stories about attempts to control the public narrative which have dominated American journalism since around 2015. Yet he accurately describes the combat between exciting public narrative, and boring old truth, which has become the ascendant conflict in modern politics. He just made it twenty years early.

Late in this movie, our unholy trinity contracts a down-at-heels folksinger (Willie Nelson) to fake an antique 78-RPM Smithsonian Folkways record. One couldn’t find a better analogy for this film. If we wanted to counterfeit a “classic” movie commenting on today’s fraught political scene, it would almost certainly look like this. If I hadn’t personally watched this movie in 2005, I’d think it was too on-the-nose to possibly be real.