Client-9 (15) 117 mins *** Like his contemporary Charles Ferguson, whose Inside Job took home an Oscar last weekend, the documentarist Alex Gibney pursues his subjects with a disarming mix of high- and low-mindedness. Gibney’s superb 2006 film Enron, a pacesetter for this wave of corruption analysis, laid out the business of stock fraud while noting the extracurricular excesses of loaded execs racking up humongous tabs at Manhattan lap-dancing joints. With Client-9, Gibney recounts a far juicier tale: the downfall of Eliot Spitzer, onetime Governor of New York and “Scourge of Wall Street”, who resigned from office in March 2008 – months before the financial meltdown – having been caught on a FBI wiretap conducting atypical negotiations with a representative of a VIP escort agency known as The Emperor’s Club.
Gibney’s objective here is to counterbalance the tabloid-skewed reporting of the case, give the scandal a political context, and highlight those stories that got buried amid the hoopla. It was Spitzer, after all, who – in his previous incarnation as Attorney General – had gone after the major financial institutions on matters of lax regulation, backed by a crack legal team drawn to their employer’s fiercely principled stance. The film smells a rat, and though there’s plentiful evidence that Spitzer’s flies were indeed open, Gibney’s concern is how this lapse was employed to divert us from more widespread ethical failings. Politics, again, emerges as a vicious game in which the wrong guys end up winning.
The interviews are dramatic in themselves. Spitzer repents in newly muted, humbled surrounds; his enemies fulminate in stark, glassy boardrooms; there’s a real headspinner in Cecil Suwal, goofy, 22-year-old Emperor’s Club CEO. Perhaps this story has already passed into the realm of footnotes, lacking Enron’s electrifying now-ness. Yet Gibney makes the Judas-kiss-and-tells of aggrieved politicos as compelling as anything that passes the escorts’ lips, and his willingness to follow the money down high society’s shadier alleyways leads to encounters with extraordinary figures: take Roger Stone, a self-confessed swinger with a Nixon tattoo inked between his shoulderblades. In America, one concludes, even the lobbyists have just that little extra colour.
Client-9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer opens in selected cinemas today.
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