Wagging Dogses and Roaring Mices

Earlier this week I checked out one of the better political satires of the last decade or so in Wag The Dog. I can't remember if I had seen it before, though I think I had seen at least parts as it seemed rather familiar. I'm glad that I returned to it at any rate because it really is quite an astute comedy. It isn't one of those knee splapping, guffawing type comedies, but rather subtle and intelligent in its humor, though it certainly has its moments of hilarity.

When I watch a film that I find has a bit more thought put into it than the average movie, especially if it's a director that interests me in particular, I always like to go back and listen to the commentary track if there is one. I always find them rather insightful, and in this case, both director Barry Levinson and Dustin Hoffman, who co-starred in the film were performing the commentating. They were discussing political satire and how few films have been made along these lines, mentioning The Mouse That Roared as one of them. I had heard about this film many times over the years, particularly due to the great performance from Peter Sellers, but I had never had an opportunity to check it out. Ironically, I had forgotten that I recently added it to my Netflix queue, and having just returned Wag, guess what showed up in the mail? I do love it when I can watch movies together that relate in some way, but in this case, it wasn't planned, but I look forward to taking a look and drawing out some of those comparisons in my next post.

One of the things that makes satire such a difficult way to work, but so brilliant when done well, is that it requires a balance of absurdity with plausibility. Satire is not about saying that the rules of gravity don't exist and watching people suddenly start floating around freely. It's about making such a convincing argument based upon a series of contrivances and contradictions that people believe they are floating, even though the rest of us can see just how absurd that is. Successful satires always seem to get at the heart of accepted notions of truth and turn them on their heads to show just how truly, yes, absurd they really are.

If you hadn't noticed, absurdity is the key. Wag does this well because for one, it was written by the brilliant David Mamet, two, it had a great director at the helm in Barry Levinson, and three, the ensemble cast included both Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, arguably two of the greatest film actors living today. Now, all that said, it could have still fallen flat, but instead it sang. You could say that satirizing politics and war are easy targets. The two films already mentioned, along with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove certainly prove that the material is ripe, but easy, not necessarily.

The trick seems to be pushing the boundaries of reality, without becoming implausible. That's what seems to make it so brilliant. You have to ask yourself, could this really happen? Could we fake a war to save the president from a scandal? And then just as the film is released, we learn about an intern named Monica Lewinsky, and we all scratch our heads and think, did they know something that we didn't? Truth sometimes is stranger than fiction, but it isn't always quite as much fun as this.