Jeremy’s Tophunder №96: Wag the Dog

6 min readJun 11, 2020

I would hazard a guess that of the movies that populate my Tophunder list, Wag the Dog is the movie that the fewest people out there have seen.

It’s a delightfully silly (yet smart) movie about a D.C. Fixer and a Hollywood producer who team up to trick the media into thinking the U.S. is at war with Albania in order to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal two weeks before the election. Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean, the spin doctor, and Dustin Hoffman plays Stanley Motss, the producer, and both submit maybe the most underrated performances of their careers. Throw in somehow just the right amount of Anne Heche, a pinch of William H. Macy, a dash of Dennis Leary, a dusting of Willie Nelson, and a great last-minute appearance from Woody Harrelson. It’s a wonderful cast working with a pretty good script (co-written by David Mamet), all under the supervision of Barry Levinson (two-time Oscar winner). It’s actually a little surprising it’s not a more well-known movie.

The highlight of the movie is really the combination of Hoffman and De Niro, who are both fantastic, and both submitted legitimately classic performances before they both hit the “I’m getting old, I’m just going to sell out and do any movie that pays what I ask for” stage of their careers.

(If you’re wondering, Hoffman went off the reservation with 1999’s “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc,” and Robert De Niro dipped his toes in the sellout water with 2000’s “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” and really took the dive in 2002 with “Showtime.” Luckily for De Niro, he kind of bounced back in the early 2010s with Silver Linings Playbook and a few others, but he -did- also agree to star in Last Vegas and Dirty Grandpa, so, we can’t give him too much credit.)

But back to the original point — Hoffman and De Niro are both great in Wag the Dog, and do a phenomenal job selling two pretty ridiculous characters and a rather ridiculous plot. This movie has the opportunity to go off the rails at least, like, 10 or 12 times, but Hoffman and De Niro are each able to steer the ridiculousness in a direction that somehow makes sense.

Robert De Niro’s best scene is probably his first scene, when he learns of the President’s potential sex scandal, and, in a matter of minutes, has already changed the conversation:

Or maybe it’s the scene where he’s able to convince the CIA that even if the war isn’t real, they’d be really, really stupid to say anything about it.

As for Hoffman, his best scene is probably his response to the President’s opponent colluding with the CIA to “end” the “war.” De Niro and Heche think the jig is up, but that’s just when Hoffman rolls up his sleeves and starts producing Act 2.

As great as Hoffman and De Niro are, though, they’re probably not the most interesting part of the movie. In fact, the most interesting part of the movie isn’t even technically part of the movie.

Wag the Dog was released in December of 1997. Less than a month later, there was a front page story on the Washington Post, alleging that President Bill Clinton had engaged in an affair with his former intern, Monica Lewinsky. Over the next year and a half, the Clinton administration engaged in three high-profile military operations. First, they bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in response to the Al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Later in 1998, they engaged in a four-day bombing campaign of Iraq in response to Iraq’s failure to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Then in 1999, the U.S. military intervened in the Kosovo War and bombed Yugoslavia (which, out of sheer coincidence, borders Albania).

Like, are you kidding me?

At the time, there were obviously a lot of comparisons made between Wag the Dog and reality, with Clinton’s critics accusing him of tacitly using the movie as a playbook. There are certainly plenty of instances of movies inadvertently mirroring real-life events in the past, but I can’t think off too many instances of movies predicting the future so closely and in such a short time frame.

Wag the Dog is a refreshingly short movie (just 97 minutes), but it does still manage to kind of spiral out of control towards the end. The first hour is definitely bizarre and absurd, but in a way that makes you half-think, “wait, does damage-control politics actually work kind of like this?” The last half-hour, though, things kind of just get nutty. And that’s okay, because sometimes it’s fun in these kinds of movies to wink and nod to the audience and say, “hey, in case you were in doubt, this is all made up.”

But in reality, I think to some extent, damage control PR -does- probably work something like this. When there’s bad news on the horizon, do anything you can to deflect attention, and if you need to, make shit up. Do I think the Clinton administration went out of their way to involve the military overseas in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal? No. I think that’s a bit too cynical. But on a smaller scale, I think this absolutely happens. There’s a very real strategy often referred to as the “Friday news dump,” wherein an organization or political administration will release all of the news they’d rather not publicize on a Friday afternoon, because less people keep track of the news on Friday night and Saturday than they do for the rest of the week. In the era of social media and 24-hour news channels, this is perhaps a bit out-dated, but it was certainly a trend for many years.

So when I think about Wag the Dog, what do I think about first? Do I think about how funny De Niro and Hoffman are, and how the movie goes off the deep end in the last half-hour, or do I think about how close something this seemingly ridiculous is to reality? In truth, it’s a little bit of both. I haven’t really spent much time quoting other movie critics in this space, but I feel like Roger Ebert might as well be a good place to start, if only because his thoughts on the movie are pretty close to my own. In his review, he wrote, “the movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder.”

Yeah. That sounds like a pretty good summary to me.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short