Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Having hit the brick wall of his ostensible subject’s natural humorlessness, Gibney didn’t have much choice but to put Spitzer at the center of a larger sort of national tragedy. But “Client 9’’ is high farrago. The movie’s central idea is that the airing of the governor’s indiscretions was part of what Hillary Clinton notoriously called a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Gibney argues, as others before him have, that Spitzer had so many enemies in state government and on Wall Street that, if he had secrets, it was only a matter of time until they pooled their resources and ferreted them out. It’s the very tactic that Charles Ferguson’s current financial-crisis documentary, “Inside Job,’’ advocates using to get corrupt politicians and CEOs to testify: broadcast their dirty laundry. Spitzer contributes a lot of insight to Ferguson’s documentary but, on camera, clams up on that issue.

It takes Gibney almost two hours to build his own argument regarding the airing of Spitzer’s laundry, and, having watched it twice, that length is inexplicable. Gibney has filled the movie with anyone who would talk to him — many of them are crucial to the case the movie is making. His executive foes, like the business titans Hank Greenberg and Ken Langone, both of whom are positively radioactive with schadenfreude, explain how Spitzer overstepped his bounds. The dapper Republican consultant and loony Nixon obsessive Roger Stone may have been the chief orchestrator of the leaks that made public Spitzer’s involvement with the prostitution ring. He’s mostly just radioactively tan.