Casino Ralph

Casino Jack, George Hickenlooper's film about Republican lobbyist, con-man and extortionist Jack Abramoff opens this weekend.

Kevin Spacey is a terrific actor, and I'm sure he's great in the title role, but I was disappointed with the casting of one of his supporting players. The movie has the wrong Canadian playing Ralph Reed. Nothing against Christian Campbell, but this part really should have gone to Nicholas Lea, who is not only a dead ringer for Reed, but who proved as Alex Krycek on The X-Files that he knows how to play an oily, disingenuous, self-serving, power-mad reptile like the former executive director of the Christian Coalition.

Critics are saying mostly nice things about Spacey, but they're less kind to the movie as a whole, which many seem to think has bitten off more than it can chew in trying to cover the vastness of Abramoff's corruption.

There might be a less messy, more manageable movie to be made focusing on Reed and his role in the Abramoff machine. I'm not thinking of a Ralph Reed biopic so much as a heist movie, exploring the staggering cynicism behind his role in the elegantly simple con Abramoff was running on various Indian tribes and gullibly indignant evangelicals.

The con was a double shakedown. Abramoff signed on as a lobbyist for the tribes who were seeking to preserve or expand their gambling enterprises. He would take their money and then channel some of it to Reed who would use it to drum up opposition to the tribes' agenda through his various religious right connections. Abramoff would then go back to the tribes, explaining that he would need millions more in order to fight the sudden burst of opposition from religious right voters. They repeated this cycle more than once. So while Abramoff was milking the tribes, Reed was bilking the churches — both pulling in money hand over fist while conspiring together against the interests of both of the groups they claimed to be working for.

What would be interesting to explore is whether or not Reed viewed this scam as a departure from his previous fundraising and lobbying efforts on behalf of the religious right. I'm guessing not. His role in Abramoff's scheme, after all, was to do what he had always done — raise a ton of money by warning of some impending threat, be it gambling or gays or secular humanism or whatever other bogeyman seems to resonate most lucratively at any given time. The only difference between his work for Abramoff and everything he had done previously with the Christian Coalition was that now he was coordinating his efforts with the bogeyman to maximize his return.

In any case, we'd probably want to write a fictional happy ending for our movie, since in real life Ralph Reed inexplicably escaped prosecution for his role in Abramoff's illegal scam. I can imagine several ways in which the tribes might team up with the churches to get their revenge, but I just saw A Christmas Carol for the umpteenth time and it's got me in a holiday spirit, so I'm more inclined to look for something with more of a repentance-and-redemption note to it. Maybe we could have him experience a spiritual transformation at the end and pull a full Zaccheus — "Look, half of my possessions I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much."

Then again, maybe that's too much of a stretch. You can take some liberties in a movie inspired by actual people and events, but having Ralph Reed convert to Christianity would probably be more than any audience would be willing to believe.