Good comedy, as any comedian will tell you, is largely a question of timing.

I imagine, therefore, that the director Barry Levinson must be rubbing his hands with glee at the chain of events inside the White House just lately.

The movie he intended to be a "workshop project", an adaptation of Larry Beinhart's novel, has become suddenly a satire as topical as the nine o'clock news. Life, once again, has imitated art.

Beinhart had in mind events in Grenada during Ronald Reagan's era when he wrote of an unnamed president going to war to divert the public's gaze from his indiscretion with a young woman in the Oval Office. Monica Lewinsky, at that time, was doing little more than playing hopscotch in the park.

In the case of Wag The Dog, the president's war a is wholly fictitious one; an invention of White House spin doctors. Nevertheless, its faked footage on the tea-time news galvanises the nation behind a leader whose talent is for dropping not bombs but his trousers.

Levinson and his collaborators Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro have produced here a satirical comedy reminiscent of Robert Altman at his best.

De Niro is a clipped, tweed-wearing PR man; the Einstein of spin doctors. He lets it slip to the press that Albanian terrorists have placed a suitcase bomb in Canada, in order to smuggle it into the US.

At the same time, he speculates on whether America might use its highly-secret (in fact non-existent) B3 bomber to retaliate.

Hoffman, meanwhile, is a Hollywood mogul hired by the White House to "produce" the war; to mock up the battle footage in a TV studio and orchestrate the homecoming of the victorious soldiers. "War is showbusiness," he says. "You think this is tough? I was two weeks into shooting The Song of Solomon before I discovered I didn't have the rights."

Since this is a war with no soldiers, victorious or otherwise, Hoffman and De Niro substitute a convict who won't ask questions, played in a cameo by Woody Harrelson with the conviction of someone who's been told he'll hang tomorrow.

The original novel has been adapted for the screen by David Mamet, with, one suspects, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

The usual Hollywood safety mechanisms designed to sanitise material such as this are happily absent.

Wag The Dog is all the more remarkable given that it was shot on a budget smaller than Bruce Willis's meal allowance, and in less time than Schwarzenegger takes to spell his name. The big-name talent involved here is on board purely for the love of it.

There are faults: Hoffman is prone to saying, "This is what producing's all about", every time someone talks to him, and the comedian Denis Leary is misplaced, I felt. But none of this can detract either from the fun of the piece - or, indeed, from the sudden, worrying realisation that the timing of the recent crisis in Iraq might have been engineered to coincide with the president's bed-time.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.