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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Client 9 (2010)


Mr. Spitzer told an aide, “Welcome to a Greek tragedy.”  More like a depressing lesson in power politics. While its full title suggests that “Client 9” is about the highs and lows in one powerful man’s life, the movie is more rightly an anatomy of political gamesmanship at a high level. 
The New York Times, which, on March 10, 2008, broke the story that Mr. Spitzer had been linked to a prostitution ring. Two days later the governor — who as the state’s attorney general had overseen the 2004 bust of a prostitution ring — resigned from office, apologizing for not living “up to what was expected of me.”
The movie spends some time checking into the prostitution angle but that is almost ancillary to the movie's overall message.  Mr. Spitzer couldn't have been taken down without Mr. Spitzer's help.  True, that.  But the movie doesn't go about inquiring how a man might get caught up in expensive call girls and late night parties.
The juiciest parts of this story weren’t the explicit, sometimes banal details, like Mr. Spitzer’s famous black socks. No, the good stuff involves the power brokers who — enraged by Mr. Spitzer’s activism as attorney general, specifically in his hard-charging capacity as the Sheriff of Wall Street — might have had something to do with his downfall. 
Two such enemies were Mr. Bruno, a former boxer and notorious political pugilist, makes a colorful, entertaining interview subject, and the strategist Roger Stone. Both men are important stops on the trail of bread crumbs that the filmmaker persuasively sprinkles that leads to Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman of A.I.G., and that snakes over to Kenneth G. Langone, a co-founder of Home Depot and a former director of the New York Stock Exchange. As attorney general, Mr. Spitzer sued Mr. Greenberg and A.I.G., and named Mr. Langone in a suit for his part in the compensation package paid to Richard A. Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, whose $139.5 million haul became emblematic of Wall Street greed.
Eliot Spitzer was right about Wall St. and that fact is not lost on the maker's of this movie.

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