Movie Review: Dark Money

Dark Money *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Kimberly Reed.

Written by: Kimberly Reed and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg.

 

The documentary Dark Money takes on an important issue in American politics – how the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling pretty much made it legal for corporations to anonymously donate unlimited funds in order to get their preferred candidates elected. Sure, they are supposed to donate the money to organizations that operate independently from the candidates – ones that are just politically motivated groups. But the cause and effect is the same as if they directly contributed to candidates – they buy influence – and perhaps even worse, because no one can tell who is actually donating this money and what their real purpose may be.

 

The film mainly centers on Montana – who up until Citizens United had the strictest campaign finance laws in America, owing to a bill passed in 1912, after the citizens of Montana were tired of the Anaconda Mining Company essentially buying every election (in addition, they poisoned the earth, which still causes problems to this day). In Montana, it is expected that you are a “citizen” politician – that is, even if you are in the state legislature, you have another, full time job (this is easier, because apparently they only sit for 90 days every other year – and are only paid for the time they are sitting). The idea here is so simple and commonsense that you cannot believe it seems like such a novel idea – that the people who actually live and work in these communities should be the ones who represent the people in them to the government. Everyone in Montana – Democrat and Republican alike – seemed to like the way the system was working. And then, course, the dark money starting showing up in their elections. Misleading mailers were sent out to people, attack ads increased dramatically, and spending went through the roof. If you were a Republican, but not wholly on board the train, you’d be targeted in the primaries and forced out.

 

The film walks through the time starting in about 2011 and going to fairly recently when this spending exploded, and the consequences that flowed from there. The narrator, in a sense, is John Adams – a journalist who tried to follow the money to see what he could find, but could only get so far – especially after he’s fired from his job, and essentially has to become an independent journalist. Despite all his digging, he still probably wouldn’t have found out what he wanted if it weren’t for a bizarre sequence of events, that ends with documents being found in a crack house in Colorado. Those documents ended up with criminal charges against the Republican leader of the state senate.

 

Dark Money is important subject, so much so that director Kimberly Reed doesn’t feel the need to pump up the filmmaking in anyway. That’s important in one way, because it protects the film from attacks on it being biased on being a hit job of some kind – the film lets everyone speak, and while it has a point of view, it’s an easy to defend point of view, shared by people of all political stripes in Montana. It also, frankly, makes the film a little dull to watch at times – everyone in the film remains so even keeled throughout, as does the filmmaking, that it risks lulling you to sleep a little bit. It’s fascinating to see how all this works – but it requires a certain type of viewer, in a certain type of mood. It does what it does very well – even if it is more than a little dry.