Just to set the stage, I took the bus (one transfer) on a beautiful fall day, to a 1 pm matinee at Eastport Plaza, out on SE 82nd, a major thoroughfare and home to big Asian supermarkets. Such a store was my first destination: Hong Phat, a remodeled WalMart, to eat some no-frills salad rolls and a little sushi, while chatting with my distant daughter on the iPhone.
I texted some other friends on the way, as bus riding is conducive to phone chatting. My peer group is quite anti Trump and they worried this was maybe a propaganda movie.
So what if it was, right? I'm a big consumer of propaganda, a primary or raw material for the kind of anthropology I'm into. I study cults, left and right. Plus I'm in one, one could say, producing propaganda of my own (or call it advertising).
But it wasn't really a propaganda film, or at least not of the shallow type, all hype and puffery. I already knew from the NPR interview with the director that I caught in the car, coming back from the Seattle area recently, that this would be an empathetic view without constituting an endorsement. I would assess the film will have approximately zero impact on the final outcome of the 2024 presidential race. Most people will catch it later.
Dr. D. (PhD) joined me, arriving by EV, just as the previews got going. The smallish theater had only two others besides ourselves. This 1 pm matinee was the latest showtime available, on a Sunday anyway.
These were lounge style seats. I don't usually make it to this particular theater and didn't figure out how to operate the recliner controls until after the movie was over, although the seat did seem to kick back a bit on its own (I must've rubbed up against the button).
Anyway, those details out of the way, what was this?
A fictionalized not-documentary that reminds us of the timeline. When Donald was doing this, Nixon was doing that. When DT was onto building Trump Tower, we were up to Mayor Koch already.
Mayor Koch... so I would've been in Jersey City, close to penniless, a Catholic school teacher, but writing to Koch anyway (not that often), about various city plans I had: train to plane; high def illuminated billboard near Journal Square; IMAX in the Stanley; something about navy submarines (for tourists).
But I had no Roy Cohn to take me under his wing. I had Ray and Bonnie Simon, who took me under theirs, and I learned a lot from them, not to mention a small income for taking care of their baby daughter. Ray and Bonnie both had work in the Big Apple. We'd sit around their living room table after hours, getting deep in to philosophy and pop culture.
Ray and Bonnie were both closer to the show biz world and that whole chapter in my life was about tuning in show business (its centrality).
Then, after Trump Tower, came the Atlantic City chapter, and then Trump buys Mar-a-lago, and the movie draws to a close. He's still married to Ivana. His mentor Roy has died. The Art of the Deal, the book, is just getting underway.
No Miss Universe, no Apprentice on TV, no running for president, except for foreshadowing. It's all about his family matrix (mom and dad, brother Frank) right when he's becoming a "self made" man. It's a coming of age story.
I found the Roy Cohn character captivating, a star performance, which in the movie, Trump did too (he found Roy fascinating).
So as the director says: it's a movie with empathy for its protagonist. The camera rarely gets far from the Donald. We're always finding stuff out when he does. The camera never drifts off to follow others, making us privy to what they're saying about Trump behind his back. We simply don't go behind Trump's back. He's the center around which the world turns, an entirely valid point of view obviously, for either a novel or a fictional film.
The Trump character doesn't seem that much like him at first, but it's a good performance and he seems to gradually adopt the mannerisms, gestures and phraseology we've come to expect. I don't have any strong issue with anyone's acting. Or the directing. The script paints in broad, bold brush strokes, serving a didactic function, educating its audience about the thermodynamics of it all.
Roy is tough, a "killer" (he doesn't shoot anyone), some say vicious, but the movie wants to humanize him as well, and in my book succeeds.
He considers himself a true American patriot, and regards his winning the death penalty for the Rosenbergs one of his greatest achievements. He admires Trump because he's a privileged golden boy aristocrat who has chosen an uphill battle. Roy perceives that Trump needs a true bully in his corner, to fight the bullies. His friendship is authentic, but becomes strained in the end.
Whatever the real Roy was like, this one was believable, and consistently rendered. Bravo.
The last time I was at this theater, I forget which movie, I emerged to find then president Trump had approved the martyring of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, thereby adding to the lawless mayhem that is otherwise described as the rules based order.
Friends (Quakers) don't celebrate outward violence, nor do I recall a lot of flag-waving at the time. More just worry and concern. Portland is not as into Murder Inc. as some cities I could name. Trump had by then become another swamp creature, a kind of political dinosaur, a living fossil. We still have quite a few of those around, still thrashing about, making waves while going under.
