Thursday, January 15, 1998
Witty satire not without real-life cue
FILM: Political intrigue parodied perfectly in comedy ‘Wag the
Dog’
By Martin F. Nolan
The Boston Globe
In 1930, George S. Kaufman said, "Satire is what closes on
Saturday night." In 1931, the curmudgeonly playwright proved
himself wrong when he wrote, with Morrie Ryskind and the Gershwin
brothers, the political satire "Of Thee I Sing," the first musical
to win a Pulitzer Prize.
"I should welcome any war. The country needs one," Theodore
Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the Navy, wrote to Henry
Cabot Lodge in 1897. Could someone start a war heedlessly, for
political reasons? That is the point of "Wag the Dog," a satire
that roars at over-the-top speed. The opening scene, in a war room
reminiscent of "Dr. Strange-love," introduces Robert De Niro as Mr.
Fix-It, bearing a laptop laden with tricks and disinformation.
He soon downloads the president’s political dilemma and links up
with a legendary (meaning he owns a big house) Hollywood producer
played by Hoffman. In the hellzapoppin’ plot, Hoffman has the best
lines because "Wag the Dog" satirizes Hollywood more than
Washington, which explains why it was among the top four films in
last week’s box-office report, grossing $7.8 million. Show biz
lingo trumps Beltway banter as Willie Nelson picks at his guitar to
find a marketable maudlin yellow-ribbon ditty for celebrities to
croon.
The biggest political tail ever to wag a strategic dog, the war
Theodore Roosevelt wished for began 100 years ago when the USS
Maine steamed into Havana harbor. Ostensibly a "courtesy" call, the
visit was an effort to intimidate Cuba’s colonial ruler, Spain,
which had been fighting Cuban rebels.
At 9:40 p.m. on Feb. 15, an explosion destroyed the battleship,
killing 260 members of its 350-man crew. To this day, no one knows
how the USS Maine blew up, but William Randolph Hearst’s New York
Journal had a headline ready: "The Whole Country Thrills With the
War Fever."
Cuba was a pawn in Hearst’s circulation fight with Joseph
Pulitzer’s World. When the artist Frederic Remington complained
about nothing to depict for Hearst’s papers, the publisher replied:
"You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war." Hearst, who never
denied the gist of this message, called the Spanish-American War
"the Journal’s war."
The strongest satire is self-parody. In "Wag the Dog" every
crisis is a "piece of cake" to Hoffman, compared to "a pitch
meeting at 10 a.m. when you’re coked to the gills and haven’t even
read the treatment."