WAG THE DOG (53)

Directed by: Barry Levinson

Starring: Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Heche

The Pitch: A Hollywood producer is approached by White House spin-doctors to stage a war with Albania, hoping to distract attention from Presidential scandal.

Theo Sez: Terrific stuff for about half its length - sharp both on Washington and Hollywood, with a roving camera and an unexpectedly complicated look (shimmering lights amid appropriately heavy shadows) ; then it runs out of steam, reduced to desperate plot twists and characters not so much talking as hectoring ("Television destroyed the electoral process," we are told). The problem - quite apart from the fact it's a one-joke premise - is perhaps that it isn't quite as clever or perceptive as it thinks : the war-as-distraction ploy is admittedly spot-on (if not exactly original), and the ease with which public opinion can be shaped in the media age is, I guess, something that needed to be said (for those who may have doubted or not thought about it). But the film is simple-minded when it comes to studying the media machine, and stuck in 20-year-old CAPRICORN ONE territory when it talks of cover-ups and faking a Teflon-perfect reality to conceal the real one. In fact, the idea of perfection is a 50s concept more likely to provoke cynical suspicion nowadays, when even the most homespun heroes (Ronald Reagan, say) need some chink in the armour, some flaw for supporters to rally round : if the film showed its conspirators deliberately creating the spurious "debates" that journalism thrives on, giving its faked war-hero a properly sleazy "human interest" story - a battle with drugs, say, with a tearful Oprah appearance from his faked ex-girlfriend - that would be satire. As it is, their desperate attempts to keep the (terminally corny) deception going seem increasingly hollow, and the film increasingly out-of-touch, not to say off-target : basically, the world is a much more twisted place than Levinson and Co. seem to realise or admit. As "Neon" magazine put it (in a rare moment of insight), "the far scarier idea isn't that the Gulf War was faked - it's that it did happen, and everyone thought it was just good TV."