You really blew the lid off of nookie

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Crit

Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. In the finale of Those Bastards! weekend, the reasonably plausible premise that the governor's downfall was engineered by powerful enemies he had made as a crusader is less interesting than:

1. the fresh perspective provided on the eternal question, Why do powerful men risk everything by thinking with their dicks? and
2. the extraordinary range of access the filmmakers had to principals: Spitzer himself, several of those powerful enemies, and the barely-legal, giggle-handicapped madam of the Emperor's Club, as I believe the institution was called.

And apart from some unfortunate cheesiness (especially the use of an actress to portray "Angelina," the governor's regular call girl [notwithstanding the self-aggrandizement campaign of Ashley Dupré], whose extensive testimony is key to the story, but who declined to appear on camera), this is a remarkable and thought-provoking film.

Spitzer, who is not blind to the elements of Greek tragedy in his story, is astonishingly frank in his self-assessment. (He's one of the sympathetic talking heads in yesterday's documentary, too, though there he makes just one oblique allusion to his fatal flaw.) And while not cutting him any slack regarding his hubristic overreaching and his grotesque bankruptcy in the diplomatic skills required of a politician in a democracy, director Alex Gibney convincingly portrays him as a larger-than-life hero who stupidly stubbed his toe, who let all of us down in letting his family and his principles and himself down. On the issue of whether he thinks Joe Bruno and Ken Langone and others with good reason to hate the former state's attorney who seemingly was the one man in law enforcement asking hard questions about life on Wall Street years before the meltdown were behind the unusual federal investigation into prostitution, Spitzer acknowledges, to his credit, that it doesn't matter: that the man most responsible was Eliot Spitzer.

And ultimately, he can't answer the Big Question.