CASINO JACK
This harsh philosophy emerges in the very first scene, as Abramoff brushes his teeth in an office men’s room and addresses himself in the mirror. “Mediocrity is where most people live,” he observes. “Mediocrity is the elephant in the room. It’s ubiquitous. Mediocrity [is] in your schools, it’s in your dreams, it’s in your family. . . And those of us who know this, those of us who understand the disease of the dull, we do something about it. . . . You’re either a big leaguer or you’re a slave clawing your way onto the C train.” His own words drive him into a rage: “I will not allow my family to be slaves! I will not allow the world I touch to be vanilla!” He gives a little Cagney-style shrug of the shoulders and concludes: “I’m Jack Abramoff. And oh yeah—I work out every day.” To deflate this grandiose soliloquy, Spacey adds a lovely comic touch, pausing to regard himself and then resuming his tooth brushing.
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Though Casino Jack never lets its protagonist off the hook for his misdeeds, it does underline the hypocrisy of those politicians who were content to take his money but then ran for cover in February 2004 when the Washington Post began to expose his fleecing of six different Indian tribes. The movie climaxes with Abramoff’s testimony before the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee—whose chairman, John McCain, had seen his 2000 presidential bid derailed by an Abramoff smear campaign. In real life Abramoff took the fifth, refusing to answer the senators’ questions, but in a fantasy sequence here he leaps to his feet and denounces his inquisitors. Told by McCain that he’s out of order, Abramoff mimics Al Pacino’s classic courtroom rant from And Justice for All: “You’re out of order! You’re all out of order! This whole senate hearing is out of order!”
