The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"Pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes." John Ruskin.Rarely outside of Morgan Spurlock or Michael Moore have I enjoyed a documentary as much as I have Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. Filled with sex and power, it presents the gamut of intrigues worthy of tragedy or soap opera--never dull, almost always entertaining. Cheesy and improbable, it is the story of the New York State attorney general who rose in the early years of the first decade to become governor and after a year to resign because he was caught using a call-girl service.Having sex with a prostitute is hardly worthy of Sophocles' plays, but it is richly ironic when the governor prosecuted the very services he used.Writer/director Alex Gibney has fashioned this doc as a low-key support for the theory that Eliot Spitzer's enemies helped bring him down. To Spitzer's credit, he attributes his fall to himself with a hubris befitting Greek tragedy. Gibney's interview of Spitzer is first-rate journalism with a willing subject and reasonable questions.Irony abounds: Gibney does an admirable job showing how Spitzer could have been the first Jewish president—he's that gifted as a hard-charging, ethical avatar until Gibney explores his fatal decision to cheat on one of the loveliest political wives this side of Elizabeth Edwards. As always, unanswered questions remain about the marital circumstances that could drive him to pay for attractive hookers. However, the off-center idea of the FBI probing into Spitzer's private life is absurd anyway when terrorists and corrupt bankers are bringing the world down.Until the overly-long disquisition on the call-girl industry and lurid shots of the young women, the treatment of Spitzer's "war" with Wall Street and giants like AIG is the stuff of thriller fiction, except it's real. In that part of the doc, Gibney is historically spot on about the beginnings of the Great Recession. Irony again reigns when the very knight to fight these corrupt forces is neutered by the most common failing of all mortals—hubris.

Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York, is a man of great integrity who made a lot of enemies while he was the only one with enough guts to bring to justice men in higher positions of the financial world. Mr. Spitzer had one of the brightest futures in American politics had he still been in charge as New York's attorney general, or even as governor of the state. His victory was one of the most short lived, perhaps, in the history of politics.This powerful man was winning every possible battle against the corruption that is so prevalent in those higher spheres. Eliot Spitzer went after powerful figures, notably the case against Maurice Greenberg, who profited handsomely from his tenure at AIG, one of the firms the US government had to rescue from collapsing. Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, and good friend of Mr. Greenberg, had a beef against Mr. Spitzer, who also dared to question the 139 million package given to Richard Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange.It was Mr. Langone who vowed revenge from his arch enemy and the people in his circle that were being questioned by Eliot Spitzer. It was not too hard for this rich wheeler dealer to find the right man to begin tailing the governor. What the investigator found was a side of Mr. Spitzer that was contrary to the public image he projected of rectitude and honesty. Mr. Spitzer's weakness was for highly paid prostitutes. One in particular, caught his fancy and that proved to be the beginning of his own downfall. Unfortunately, the higher ups that were so corrupt, won. The day of his resignation several of the figures that were investigated by Mr. Spitzer toasted merrily about the fall of their avowed enemy at "21", a place where all these influential men gather to socialize.The documentary is a lesson in dirty politics. Directed by Alex Gibney, the man that has given us many interesting and informative documents in which recent history about wrongdoing by the rich and powerful go unpunished because of their access to powerful lawyers that are able to get them out of their jams with impunity. Sadly, Mr. Spitzer did not have to have resigned. After all, have we not seen other men in similar situations go on without batting an eyelash? A former American president included?

Film manages to maintain interest without seeming overtly like a propaganda piece which is what i honestly thought it would be going in. *honestly why else would the ex governor have even participated if it wasn't for the opportunity to rehabilitate his image went my logic--an idea i'm sure many other people have thought when wondering if they should bother checking this one out. I can't really say whether you should check it out or not---it will help if you have a tolerance for smirking, and self justification (and yet somehow Spitzer doesn't indulge in the latter--remaining completely on point that he had no one to blame but himself for his own actions...what can i say? i was hoping for someone who sees conspiracy theories everywhere.) Can't help but wonder how this is going to hold up in the coming decade or two. Will it hold together as a film? will it hold as a narrative that years from now people whom have never heard of Spitzer will be able to watch this and have interest in it?, sadly i think it probably will to a certain extent---not so much because of Spitzer's fall from grace (that will inevitably repeat itself in another high ranking politician and this will if anything just seem like business as usual.) but because of the various people--wall streeters, and gov. officials interviewed throughout who take delight in seeing Spitzer smeared. Its all kinds of creepy to see these guys and gals taking such glee in being interviewed about Spitzer as well as defending themselves from Spitzer's previous accusations against them when he was a crusading governor/state attorney---you kind of start to wonder what kind of documentary these guys thought they were being interviewed for exactly.I mean in what capacity did these guys rationalize themselves into being interviewed for this doc? Was it this same rationality that led to Spitzer thinking he could continue seeing these prostitutes indefinitely without any ramifications? Why do such high ranking guys of both the governmental kind and the wall street kind think they can rationalize every action they take away as if they had a perfectly logical reason for doing what they do?) If anything can be taken away from this documentary, its not that you should be careful how you conduct yourself, its not that you should be careful whose feathers you ruffle (in the metaphorical sense of course), its not even that you shouldn't have sex with prostitutes if you're a government official (you especially shouldn't have sex with prostitutes who recognize you from the news)---its that very successful high ranking people of all professions can sell themselves on anything, especially when they really shouldn't. Throughout the film the director keeps coming back to an interview with the giggling young woman who ran the prostitution ring in the first place...and she still so obviously thinks that she did nothing wrong running such a business and making a lot of money doing so. Perhaps that's even why these people are so successful in the first place. That they're such good salesmen, that they can even fool themselves into thinking they can do anything and get away with anything because they'll always be able to rationalize it away. That they're such good salesmen that even after getting caught, they can still feel like they didn't do anything wrong at all. Overconfidence kills. (also a potential question---why are all the super successful people in this movie all seem to be sociopaths as well? and what is that supposed to mean?)

I don't go to any movie as a first attempt to "learn" about "current events" or history. I make it an ongoing point to learn about the evolution of facts on any topic that interests me through multiple sources, all of which I try to double-check and cross-reference, until my doubts about veracity are reasonably satisfied. That can still leave matters unresolved, especially when compelling evidence is stacked up on the sides of both thesis and antithesis.When I see "documentaries," it's part of challenging my current take on which way I believe the weight of truths and contradictions are tipping. The interpretative and editorial spin of any given documentary becomes a strength, and not a weakness, in this context. Many times, I come away with my own understanding of things further honed. Sometimes, I find myself completely reversed.I thought long and hard before I went to see C9. I've much respect for Alex Gibney's previous work; but I wondered whether or not seeing C9 could further inform and/or change anything I knew and opined about Spitzer.I was, and still am, deeply disappointed over the personal failings of the disgraced former Governor. I know that White Collar crime exists and that the pervasiveness of it, especially today, is not strictly a matter of a handful of Machiavellian masterminds. Broken assumptions, broken systems and failures of regulation (on many levels) are also necessary for the few to be able to relentlessly plunder the many. It is a cancer that must be fought.Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace was unforgivable, in my mind, not just because of the damage he wreaked upon himself and his family, but because of the huge setbacks that we have all suffered in the "war" against White Collar crime in the US. Spitzer was the hard-and-fast hitting Sheriff of Wall Street and a Crusader for Main Street. He never took a bribe, but he still managed to find a spectacular way to violate the public's trust while in office. Spitzer took one huge measure of personal responsibility by resigning from office; but he also created a huge political vacuum for the sorely needed fight against ongoing crimes in high places. I also knew that outrage toward Spitzer was the largest part of what I felt, going in, and that outrage creates its own blindspots.So, I stood under an umbrella, in light rain, for an hour, to see this film and I am very glad that I did. The facts presented in C9 pertaining to Spitzer's record of public service were well presented and jibed with what I already knew. But there is still special value in actually seeing the major adversarial players as they tell their own stories.Gibney pulls off a number of compelling interviews, not just with Spitzer (who was interviewed on four different occasions), but also with some former aides. Spitzer is allowed to evade specifically answering certain questions (including campaign finances), but the expression on his face and in his eyes, in those same moments, still spoke volumes to me.There's also a rogues gallery of the powerful enemies, in finance and in government (state and Federal), that Spitzer made over the course of his career in office. Several of these players get as much individual talk time as Spitzer.The middle part of the film is a whodunit-style look at how the sexual scandal came into fruition. Here's where the tag line, "You don't know the real story," comes into play. The net effect of this is to desensationalize just about everything that print and television "news" got (mostly) wrong, which is no small order.The infamous Ashley Dupree never participates in an interview for Gibney, although she still manages to get some screen/blab time in. It turns out that she very likely only had a one night stand with Spitzer.The ongoing liaison that Spitzer came to seek out through the Emperors' Club was with an entirely different "escort." While "Angelina" does not consent to be filmed (she's now a day trader and no longer in her former line of work), Angelina does agree to be interviewed. Gibney uses an actress to read/interpret Ashley's portion of the transcript. (The only thing that I disagree with about the execution of this is that Gibney does not make it clear, from the onset, that it's an actress standing in for Ashley on camera.) C9 created a new context for me, in which to re-think much of what I already knew.Spitzer is by no means let off-the-hook for literally screwing around, but the media creation is brought several notches down from shining knight and a few notches up from pariah.I was once again reminded of all of the good that Eliot Spitzer and his assembled associates managed to accomplish while in office. Some of the strategic and tactical mistakes were made clearer, too.Important questions are raised about the scandal, itself. How did the FBI come to investigate the Emperor's Club? How did a prostitution and money laundering investigation come to focus on the Mann Act and the interstate transport of women (who were of majority age and not by any stretch of the imagination "white slaves") to provide prostitution services? Who were the other clients of the Emperors' Club? Why were there so many investigative leaks to the press pointing specifically in the direction of Spitzer? Why not anyone else? As a result of seeing C9, my own view of Spitzer has become better tempered and from that improved vantage point useful new questions arise.If we set aside the sex scandal, can we say that Spitzer's official conduct in office, as AG and governor, was ends-and-means right or wrong? A handful of BadGuys(TM) were brought down, but there are many more undaunted. Has anyone else picked up Spitzer's mantle? Where are his replacements?