Prolific documentarian and HBO nonfiction lodestar Alex Gibney‘s last project for the premium cable network was Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos. The 2024 two-parter was a puppy dog-eager piece of fan service in which Gibney was the biggest fan of all, peppering David Chase and much of the surviving cast of The Sopranos with all of his questions. It was, in the grand scheme of things, perhaps Gibney’s least urgent or essential project to date, but it was light on its feet and, if anything, the rare HBO documentary that felt too short.
It could be argued that, in our current political moment, Gibney’s two-film docuseries The Dark Money Game might be one of his most essential projects, a rudimentary history lesson that you’ve probably already learned elsewhere, not that it hurts to be reminded. It’s also sloppily edited, aesthetically uninspired and frequently tedious in a way that’s not ideal given subject matter that’s nothing less than the desperately fatigued state of American democracy.
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The Dark Money Game
The two entries in The Dark Money Game — Ohio Confidential and Wealth of the Wicked — give the impression not of being coherent parts of a planned series, but of being two films about money in American politics developed simultaneously in the hopes that one or the other would coalesce. There’s enough overlapping material in the two documentaries that ideally one would have been absorbed in Gibney’s creative womb and a tight, two-hour feature would have emerged. Instead, we get two meandering two-hour films that HBO has scheduled in a two-day period in a way that underlines the flaws in each.
HBO is airing the two documentaries on April 15 (Ohio Confidential) and April 16 (Wealth of the Wicked), but they’ll both be streaming on Max on the 15th, allowing viewers to watch them in what I would consider the correct order — which is to say the opposite order from what HBO has chosen.
Wealth of the Wicked is the broader umbrella documentary, tracing the erosion of campaign finance reform dating back to the creation of the Federal Election Commission in 1975; the passage of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill in 2002; the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision; and the threads of big business and religious fundamentalist conservatism that connected those things to the current ongoing scandals of Supreme Court ethics and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
It’s all connected and if those connections sound familiar, it’s perhaps because this is Gibney working in one of his least interesting modes — namely remaking Last Week Tonight main stories without the humor. And if you don’t want to give John Oliver credit for any original reporting — it is, after all, not really what he does — then it’s adapting a 2016 book by Jane Mayer, with updated details for our increasingly disastrous modern world, in which the Supreme Court, in addition to striking down abortion as a fundamental human right, has legalized bribes in the form of “gratuities” and has said that nothing the president of the United States does within the course of official duties can be illegal. (Kimberly Reed’s 2018 documentary Dark Money, which wasn’t directly based on Mayer’s book, is one of many documentaries or long-form news reports from the last decade that recited similar material.)
Let me know when you’re going to feel like this is peppy enough stuff for four hours of viewership over two nights, especially since almost nothing in it is actually new.
Wealth features interviews with Mayer, former senator Russ Feingold, Citizens United attorney James Bopp, former evangelical abortion opponent Robert Schenck and a slate of experts on the Federalist Society, forming a familiar conspiracy board of data points linking … well … lots of stuff. Some of the key villains, including Leonard Leo and Mitch McConnell, didn’t sit down for interviews, but Bopp is a matter-of-fact enough villain for any documentary, not that he views himself as a villain.
Bopp is, in fact, so casually confident and so under-confronted by Gibney that he and his comrades in ideology will probably be able to interpret this as a loving celebration of their cause. Especially given that Gibney is determined to emphasize — correctly, obviously — that “billionaires buying elections to push their partisan agendas” isn’t exclusively a right-wing problem, even if a largely right-wing Supreme Court and attempted oligarchs like Elon Musk are the current and public faces of this phenomenon.
The documentary is dry and slow and could easily have been tightened by a half-hour. But because it’s covering a national issue that has been well and publicly chronicled over five decades, at least Gibney doesn’t struggle to find archival footage to complement his interviews.
As a primer of how we got where we are, it’s one version of the story, told with almost a rueful resignation rather than a forward-looking examination of what can be done to fix what is broken.
Wealth of the Wicked is the macro version of the story, so not airing/watching it first makes no sense. My best guess for why HBO is airing it second is that most people hearing the subject will either be uninterested or know the details already, in which case: Why bother? Fine question.
Ohio Confidential is the micro version of the story, one that uses everything in the first documentary as context, though it repeats the information from Wealth of the Wicked in even more basic form. But I guess the repetition will occur regardless of the order of viewing. And when I say “repetition,” I mean that snippets of information and quotes are literally repeated verbatim in both films. This is not a well-formed two-part series.
Wealth of the Wicked is the documentary that’s most important in its wide-reaching terms, but Ohio Confidential is the documentary that, chances are, tells the story you don’t know in its totality.
A chronicle of Ohio’s largest political bribery case — one that involved corrupt dealings with energy companies, shady fixers and some of the state’s most powerful elected officials — Ohio Confidential is largely narrated by Michael Imperioli. The Sopranos star and Wise Guy talking head is reading from the memoir by Neil Clark, whose hard-boiled tough-guy natterings Gibney approaches with a weirdly earnest respect, allowing him to somewhat impact the aesthetic of a film that is less well-equipped with archival footage than Wealth of the Wicked.
The gaps in footage force Gibney to pad out the 116-minute film with occasionally comical re-enactments. Like, for example, when Ohio Confidential is driven by audio from FBI wiretaps and when they’re conducted at a bar, Gibney accompanies the conversations with images of an ice cube in a glass or a tight close-up of an olive. Despite hard-boiled voiceover that suggests one aesthetic and a title meant to evoke 1940s and 1950s tabloid tawdriness, the re-enactments evoke neither.
It’s only in the second half of Ohio Confidential that things actually get compelling and Gibney finds a hero in the form of former Republican operative Tyler Feherman, who isn’t interesting as a person, but at least wore a wire for the FBI and helped take down the Ohio speaker of the House. For a brief period, Ohio Confidential adopts trappings of a not-very-thrilling thriller, before Gibney detours in the end to a meditation on suicide that really, really doesn’t work.
Still, the facts of this Ohio corruption case are outrageous enough that there’s value in seeing how it was allowed to happen and how law enforcement cracked the case, but that value is more visible after watching Wealth of the Wicked as an introduction or prelude.
Ohio Confidential is somehow even less solution-driven than Wealth of the Wicked, since the case at its center was cracked more by luck than skill, as several featured figures admit. If you’re the sort of person who prefers that disheartening documentaries come equipped with calls to action, that’s not where Gibney’s mind is at. It’s easy to wonder how much better The Dark Money Game might be if it had actually been conceived as a docuseries instead of two intersecting films.
Anyway, everything in these two documentaries is worth being aware of and informed about. The topic is infuriating stuff and I share Gibney’s frustrations, as will nearly any viewer who isn’t already a billionaire. But nothing in these two documentaries is conveyed in a way that enhances the facts or makes them either more entertaining or more enriching. This is important stuff, but unfortunately it is not good storytelling from a filmmaker who, far more often than not, knows from good storytelling.
