From Reagan to Trump, a movie marathon before the US elections

In one of the most famous scenes in The Last Hurrah (1958), a classic John Ford film about the end of old politics, the defeated veteran mayor played by Spencer Tracy (Frank Skeffington, a leader eroded by too much power) walks alone against the tide of a crowd celebrating the triumph of his young rival, the puppet Kevin McCluskey, a useful fool who responds to a new order and a new spectacle: that of emerging television populism. With that tracking shot, Ford displayed distance and disenchantment with a country that, as he himself showed four years later in one of his major works, the tragic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), preferred to choose the lies of legend over the truth.

It is never gratuitous to resort to Ford, but this time it is justified by the fact that his legacy is revived in a fundamental film to understand the U.S. presidential elections on November 5, Henry Fonda for President, an indispensable essay by Alexander Horwath. The Austrian film historian achieves a passionate historical x-ray of the United States through the actor who best evoked the everyman American citizen, whose elderly voice runs through the film via the audio of his final interview, granted shortly after the rise to power of Ronald Reagan, whom Fonda despised.

The protagonist of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) — Ford’s adaptation that consecrated social cinema in Hollywood, the main propaganda machine for the American dream — was clear: with Reagan in the White House, a dark and unpredictable path was opening up for the country. And there we are, on the path opened by a fourth-rate actor who found the role of his life leading a crusade in the name of God and the markets thanks to his telecommunications skills. As Fonda says in Horwath’s film, Reagan knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear, and that is always dangerous.

The ultra-capitalist ideology of the former president, the focus of Sean McNamara’s middling biopic Reagan — a simple account of his life and his anti-communist obsession starring Dennis Quaid — also permeates The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s controversial approach to the forging of Donald Trump. The recently released film stands out for the strength of its performances, with Sebastian Stan in the role of the tycoon and Jeremy Strong playing the corrupt homosexual and homophobic lawyer Roy Cohn, a close friend of Richard Nixon who learned everything under the protection of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunt.

Although not a great film, The Apprentice does point to the seed of the monster: the family racism, the dirty tricks that led to his real estate fortune, his pathological megalomania and the long shadow of a mentor whom he ended up disowning. Trump has lashed out in his usual coarse, capital-lettered style against its creators, especially its screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, hiding behind the memory of his late wife, Ivana Trump. But the essential part of Sherman’s script (according to Abbasi, rejected at the time by Clint Eastwood and Paul Thomas Anderson) is that it points to Cohn as the person who imbued the young Trump with three golden rules: “Attack, attack, and attack,” “Admit nothing, always deny everything,” and “Claim victory, never admit defeat.”

Abbasi’s portrait, with an ending that seems to want to equate the candidate who thought he was Robert Redford with Frankenstein, is anything but as incisive as Johnny Depp’s 2016 caricature in Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, directed by Jeremy Konner. This crazy satire, made up of sketches featuring everything from the alien telemuppet Alf to Doc from Back to the Future, rescues a supposedly lost home video, made from start to finish by the tycoon himself who, on the day of his 40th birthday, relates to a group of children the same beginnings that The Apprentice covers. Curiously, the master of ceremonies is Ron Howard, the director of Hillbilly Elegy (2020), a Hollywood adaptation of the memoirs of Trump’s current vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, proud heir to the self-improvement lessons of a dysfunctional Appalachian family.

The triumphant and unhinged country that took shape in the 1980s is today invoked by a series of films that deal with an identity made up of lost values. Francis Ford Coppola, who, like so many of the New Hollywood generation, has built his filmography on the schizophrenia of the American dream, has sought a way out of the labyrinth in a work that is also itself labyrinthine, Megalopolis. The veteran filmmaker can be accused of an excess of candor in his utopian recipe, based on a paradox: his protagonist, a visionary and misunderstood architect, is anchored in The Fountainhead (1949), King Vidor’s classic written by Ayn Rand and based on her own novel, whose individualistic ideas found their best interpretations precisely in the 1980s and in characters like Trump.

Opposite Coppola, newcomer Sean Price Williams shapes another kind of chaos, that of excessive cynicism about the political panorama of his country in The Sweet East, a tongue-in-cheek account of the folly of the conspiracy theories that pervade the U.S. today through the initiatory journey of an impassive and opportunistic teenage girl played by Talia Ryder. The Sweet East is especially interesting in its portrayal of an enlightened white supremacist (Simon Rex), who, at one point in the film, complains “about that commonplace perpetuated by European condescension that portrays us as a young country full of naive people.”

It is a curious reflection in light of the only recent film that dares to name the ghost of a fratricidal confrontation in the White House: Civil War by Alex Garland, who, as a novelist, screenwriter, or director, likes to play with first-world disconcerts. It is a road movie featuring journalists — among them, a veteran war photographer played by a phenomenal Kirsten Dunst — with chilling scenes, such as the one in which Jesse Plemons plays the head of a supremacist militia that executes Asians, Blacks and Latinos.

Anti-immigrant discourse (a core issue in Trump’s campaign) is also the focus of veteran Errol Morris’ new documentary, Separated. Based on the book by Jacob Soboroff, it was presented at the Venice Film Festival and has been released a few weeks before the elections as a clear warning about the Republican candidate’s inconceivable policies. Morris, a fundamental voice in understanding his country — in American Dharma (2018) he held a chilling interview with Steve Bannon about the keys to his “nationalist populism” and his strategy in building the MAGA movement through a series of film classics — this time delves into an atrocious episode of the former president’s mandate. The documentary recounts, through an investigation that includes the testimony of repentant officials, how from 2017 onwards more than 4,000 children were secretly separated from their parents without registration when they crossed the Mexican border. An illegal and traumatic strategy that continues to cause pain to this day: there are still 1,300 “orphans” who have not been able to be returned to their families due to a lack of data.

One of the big unknowns of this election is whether Trump will follow through on his threat of mass deportation if he wins. Also, given what we saw in 2020, will he accept the results if he loses on November 5? Unfortunately, the Fordist idea of triumph in defeat does not seem to suit the Republican candidate. I wish he would show the fortitude of Spencer Tracy when he loses in The Last Hurrah and asks his faithful squire Ditto, who reacts to the results with shouts and threats, to calm down. He grabs him by the shoulders and says: “Ditto, come on, behave yourself and remember: all’s fair in love and war.” And that is when Tracy starts walking against the tide of his rival’s supporters.

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