Alex Gibney’s two-part 'The Dark Money Game' explores money in politics- and mostly misses the point

There’s some fascinating stuff in both 'Ohio Confidential' and 'Wealth of the Wicked,' but neither is based on the best example of what it’s arguing.

Alex Gibney is probably the world’s most prolific documentary filmmaker, often churning out two or three films a year, and getting prime distribution for all of them. They also tend to be inconsistent in quality- his Paul Simon doc last year was outstanding; his portrait of Sopranos creator David Chase, less so.

His next film is Musk, an examination of you-know-who.

Gibney’s Musk film reportedly needed to be rethought, as tends to happen when the subject of a nonfiction film suddenly takes over a sector of the federal government. But in the meantime, Gibney has a new two-part documentary called The Dark Money Game, telling two different stories about America’s terrible campaign finance system.

The first, Ohio Confidential, debuted on Tuesday, while the second, Wealth of the Wicked, lands Wednesday, on HBO and Max. Each is about two hours long; for review and categorization purposes, I’m going to treat them as two movies, rather than a series or a two-part movie.

The project is “inspired by” Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, although the first film is about events that happened after that book was published.

Both films are for the most part right, in terms of the overarching point they’re trying to make about too much money being in politics, the Citizens United decision being wrongfully decided, and a lot of things that look a lot like naked corruption being inexplicably allowed.

But neither film quite makes the best possible case for its thesis. And is often my objection to liberal issue documentaries, neither film is likely to be viewed by many people who don’t already agree with it.

Ohio Confidential tells the story of a fairly major bribery scandal in Ohio a few years ago, in which Larry Householder, the Republican Ohio Speaker of the House — the kind of asshole politician who would make TV commercials where he shoots a TV playing his rival’s commercials — landed in prison on racketeering charges involving bribes from a nuclear power company.

Neil Clark, a lobbyist involved in the scandal, died by suicide — while wearing a “Mike DeWine for governor” t-shirt — while leaving behind a posthumous tell-all book, in which he used such expressions as “Machiavelli was a pussy.” The documentary makes creative but sometimes silly use of the memoir, having an actor read from the book in the style of a 1940s film noir gumshoe.

The film goes back and forth between telling this very entertaining story, full of colorful characters engaging in skullduggery, with earnest lectures about campaign finance, political polarization, and gerrymandering. I can’t stress enough how the former is far, far more interesting than the latter.

Then there’s the matter that… if the film is trying to make the case that Citizens United has essentially made bribery legal, the Householder case is kind of a bad example of that. Didn’t the system work? Rather than unchecked corruption, isn’t this a story of special interests bribing politicians, and not getting away with it but rather getting caught? Though Householder has, we’re told, invoked Citizen’s United in his own defense.

(Note: I know I share quite a few subscribers with the newsletter of my friend Craig Calcaterra, a former lawyer who once represented Householder, although in a different case years earlier, and not the one in which he was convicted. I will say that my search of my inbox, that brought up about 20 different newsletters over the years in which Craig touched on different developments in the case, represented a much better telling of the story than the documentary did.)

If this case had been set in South Florida and not Ohio, Billy Corben would have made the documentary, and it would have been way better.

The other documentary, Wealth of the Wicked, draws more directly from Mayer’s book, in telling the story of how the Federalist Society and other parts of the conservative legal movement spent multiple decades engineering a takeover of the Supreme Court, which culminated in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Again, most of what is said by the documentary is accurate. Clarence Thomas and other conservative judges accepting yacht rides and RVs from big donors is really not okay.

The film also flirts uncomfortably with anti-Catholicism in a couple of places, like in pointing out how much of the current court is Catholic.

It also sort of leaves out how so much of the shift on the Court is due to dumb luck and flukes of history. No Comey letter? Ruth Bader Ginsburg hangs on three more months? The Democrats might have a Court majority today.

And finally, I don’t think the overturning of Roe had much to do with the right-wing judges bowing to their financial masters. Do you think Alito, Thomas and the other conservative justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade because billionaires convinced them? Or was it because they are all lifelong true believers in the cause of doing so?

The one thing that would have made that point better is if the film concentrated more on the court’s pro-business decisions, and tied that to the pro-business lobby. The striking down of Chevron, which is only mentioned in passing, is a much better example of the film’s thesis than Dobbs.

And finally, while money in politics is certainly significant, it isn’t everything.

Near the end, we’re told that when it comes to dark money contributions, the Democrats actually raised more in 2024 than the Republicans did. So how did the Republicans win?