Doha Tribeca Film Festival: Casino Jack and Stone

As with every festival, there were choices at the DTFF that looked good on paper but in reality left a lot to be desired. The first of these disappointments was Casino Jack, directed by George Hickenlooper, who tragically died, aged just 47, two days after the screening I attended. The film's star, Kevin Spacey, was on fine form introducing the movie, cracking jokes and teasing the Arabic interpreter with a spot-on impression of Bill Clinton (it's germane to the movie). It's a shame that this is Hickenlooper's last film, though, since it's really not his best; his forte was definitely documentaries (Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, The Mayor Of Sunset Strip), but I also I have a soft spot for Factory Girl, an often overlooked film that perhaps should serve as a cautionary tale for filmmakers and studios that try to prioritise awards over audiences.

Casino Jack's real-life scandals were also the subject of Casino Jack And The United States Of Money, a recent documentary by Gonzo director Alex Gibney, which I heard was something of a let-down in Sundance earlier this year too (so if that also failed, I'm wondering now if there isn't an inherent flaw in the appeal of this story). The subject is Jack Abramoff, an American lobbyist who was jailed in 2006 for fraud and corruption, having bilked several Native-American tribes of millions of dollars for supposedly representing their interests while actually overcharging and not-so-secretly despising them. Abramoff is quite the player, and his special interest is in the world of gambling; not only is this, of course, one of the key Native-American concerns in the US, owing to land-use rights, it was also a private business fetish of his (in a rambling subplot, Abramoff gets involved in a complicated bid to buy a floating casino company called SunCruz). Meanwhile, Abramoff is seen as an off-colour but still oddly respectable Washington citizen, investing his money in upmarket restaurants while his wife plays homemaker to their apple-pie kids.

There's only one thing wrong with this picture. Jack Abramoff is horrible. I don't just mean unsympathetic, I mean just simply awful. Ghastly. Vile. Grotesque. Hickenlooper, and Spacey in particular, try to have some fun with this, but the truth is, this money-grabbing, noxious individual represents nothing but the venality of America's, and now our, finance system, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing at all caperish or whimsical about watching a man lie, cheat and steal – in plain view – to line his own pockets. There is an attempt at the end to pull the rug from under us and take a stand on this – in an Il Divo-like fantasy scene, Abramoff points the finger at his equally culpable prosecutors – but it's nowhere near enough. My skin crawls just thinking of Jack Abramoff (imagine a more plausible, American Jeffrey Archer), and this film lets him off way too lightly.


Also in the not-for-me-thanks pile was John Curran's Stone (above), which pairs Edward Norton and Robert De Niro in a near-incomprehensible tale of intrigue and karma. I'll ignore the bizarre flashback prologue that explains how De Niro's character, parole officer Jack Mabry, has dominated his mousey wife for years. Instead, I'll leap into the central drama, which involves Edward Norton, as convicted arsonist Gerald 'Stone' Creeson, trying to manipulate Jack into giving him an early release. This he does by putting into Jack's way his hot, sexually promiscuous wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich), who seduces Jack and persuades him to give Stone the all-clear when his case comes up.

Did I mention that this all happens in the last month or so of Jack's otherwise spotless career? Yes, it's that kind of movie, where things happen 'just because', and in which character motivation is so wayward I still don't know really what happened or who was scamming who. On the Norton scale, this is a good but not great performance, even though he clearly relishes the white Snoop Dogg persona he's found for it. Jovovich is pretty OK too, considering the weight she's up against (it's a shame she doesn't get many more of these kinds of parts). And De Niro... Well, this is by no means his recent best – I thought that accolade goes to his great performance in the otherwise awful What Just Happened – but compared to Meet The Fockers it's at least grounded and intelligent.

And speaking of the Fockers, the DTFF rather unwisely brought in De Niro to promote the latest instalment in a talk called Little Fockers: Development And Evolution Of The Meet The Parents Franchise. I wish someone had told De Niro the title; instead of a enlightening debate, we saw host Geoffrey Gilmore struggling manfully with the taciturn actor while producer Jane Rosenthal did her best to convince us that there's life in this flea-bitten old dog just yet. For the record, Little Fockers, from what I could gather from a trailer and a bit of EPK, looks pretty terrible, potentially made bearable by the return of Owen Wilson. It was a shame this event took place on the last day of the DTFF, because the organisers had tried their best to make the lavish five-day festival as much about art and talent as they could. Sadly, De Niro dropped the M-bomb when asked what keeps him interested in the Fokkers franchise. “Money,” he quipped. This may be true, but it's a joke that a young, developing, keen-to-be-taken-seriously film festival, held in a very wealthy corner of the world, could definitely do without.