Washington Post film critic Ty Burr not only hated the biopic Reagan with Dennis Quaid as too soft and bland. He lashed out at the young-Trump movie The Apprentice as not at all harsh enough on Trump. Shouldn't Republicans always be unintelligent monsters? So say the film critics on the Left.
Burr mentioned both movies near the top of his movie review on the front page of Thursday's Style section: "The Apprentice isn’t the scorched-earth hit job that Donald Trump supporters have feared and others have hoped for. Nor is it the kind of bland Great Man biopic that would sweep its subject’s flaws and crimes under the rug, as in the recent Reagan."
The Trump film's director Ali Abbasi disappointed the Left by saying he didn't want to make a “political movie.” That might just be a way to expand the audience right in mid-October when it can have political impact. Burr shot back: "If that strikes you as disingenuous or naive or both — if the idea of a Trump movie that isn’t political seems absurd, if even possible — you’re not the only one. (That includes several audience members at the Q&A who expressed surprise that the film wasn’t harder on the 45th president.)"
So Trump should basically be presented as Satan. Burr says Roy Cohn is Satan, several times. The movie is "the tale of how a raw young real estate brat from Queens became Donald Trump under the tutelage of Satan himself, Roy Cohn, who served as Joe McCarthy’s wingman in the 1950s." Communists are never villains, only anti-communists.
Burr repeats the Satan part here: actor Jeremy "Strong has the showier performance; his Cohn is reptilian and mesmerizingly assured, the snake in the garden of the Big Apple." And: "the older man takes him under his wing as a blank template for the dark arts according to Roy Cohn, rules of the road that, in Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay, have the blunt force of hindsight."
This does not sound like an apolitical movie! Then Burr turns to a marital-rape scene, and you ask "the film should have been harder on Trump"?
So, yes, there is the scene of marital rape to which Ivana testified and later recanted. In the film, it’s an ugly argument that becomes something far uglier and more violent, and that Abbasi stages with a detachment not so much reportorial as uninflected. It’s a shocking sequence, yet it leaves barely a ripple.
As we noted before, Burr really hated Reagan and while Roy Cohn was Satan, he can't imagine why communism would be seen as evil:
Reagan organizes its narrative around its subject’s lifelong fight against the Red Menace, which it assumes we know is bad without being told why. Godlessness, mostly....
The faithful for whom Reagan was made aren’t likely to see that it’s a hagiography as rosy and shallow as anything in a Kremlin May Day parade. As pop-culture propaganda — popaganda, if you will — the movie’s strictly for true believers. As history, it’s worthless.
