Spitzer, who has a penchant for grandiose comparisons (“The only metaphor I can think of is Icarus”), isn’t pressed very hard. The parade of talking heads is rather dulling, and the editorial choices (an interviewee likens Wall Street brokers to sharks. Cue: footage of real sharks!) are highly questionable. As corporate exposes go, it’s best to stick with Inside Job.  Client-9: Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill  Seven rating: * * *  Like his contemporary Charles Ferguson, whose Inside Job took home an Oscar last weekend, the documentarist Alex Gibney pursues his subjects with a disarming mix of high- and low-mindedness.  His superb 2006 film Enron, a pacesetter for this wave of corruption analysis, laid out the business of stock fraud while noting the extra-curricular excesses of loaded execs racking up humongous tabs at Manhattan lap-dancing joints.  With Client-9, Gibney recounts a far juicier tale: the downfall of Eliot Spitzer, one-time Governor of New York and “Scourge of Wall Street”, who resigned from office in March 2008 – months before the financial meltdown – having been caught on an FBI wiretap conducting atypical negotiations with a representative of a VIP escort agency known as The Emperors Club.  Gibney’s objective here is to counterbalance the tabloid-skewed reporting of the case, give the scandal a political context, and highlight those stories that got buried amid the hoopla.  It was Spitzer, after all, who – in his previous incarnation as Attorney General – had gone after the major financial institutions on matters of lax regulation, backed by a crack legal team drawn to their employer’s principled stance.  The film smells a rat, and though there’s plentiful evidence that Spitzer’s flies were indeed open, Gibney’s concern is how this lapse was employed to divert us from more widespread ethical failings. Politics, again, emerges as a vicious game in which the wrong guys end up winning.  The interviews are dramatic in themselves. Spitzer repents in newly muted, humbled surrounds; his enemies fulminate in stark, glassy boardrooms. There’s a real headspinner in Cecil Suwal, the goofy, 22-year-old Emperors Club CEO.  Perhaps this story has already passed into the realm of footnotes, lacking Enron’s electrifying now-ness. Yet Gibney makes the Judas-kiss-and-tells of aggrieved politicos as compelling as anything that passes the escorts’ lips, and his willingness to follow the money down high society’s shadier alleyways leads to encounters with extraordinary figures. Take Roger Stone, a self-confessed swinger with a Nixon tattoo inked between his shoulder blades.  In America, one concludes, even the lobbyists have just that little extra colour.
This examination of the could-have-been mighty career of Eliot Spitzer is best    left alone. Rating: * *