From Reagan to Trump, a film marathon before the US elections | culture

In one of the most famous scenes in The last hurrah (1958), a classic John Ford film about the end of the old politics, the defeated veteran mayor, played by Spencer Tracy (Frank Skeffington, a leader hollowed out by too much power), goes alone against the tide of a crowd that Celebrating the triumph of his youth is rival, the puppet Kevin McCluskey, a useful fool who reacts to a new order and a new spectacle: that of the emerging television populism. With this tracking shot, Ford showed distance and disillusionment towards a country that, as he himself showed four years later in one of his major works, was tragic The man who shot Liberty Valance (1962) preferred the lies of legend to truth.

It’s never in vain to draw on Ford, but this time it’s justified by reviving his legacy in a fundamental film for understanding the US presidential election on November 5th. Henry Fonda becomes presidentan indispensable essay by Alexander Horwath. The Austrian film historian achieves a passionate historical x-ray of the United States through the actor who best evokes the average American citizen, whose older voice runs through the film, in the tone of his last interview, which he granted shortly after Ronald Reagan came to power, whom Fonda despised.

The protagonist of Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) – Ford’s adaptation, which consecrated Hollywood social cinema, 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 here we are, on the path opened by a fourth-rate actor who, thanks to his telecommunications skills, has found the role of a lifetime as the leader of a crusade in the name of God and the markets. As Fonda says in Horwath’s film, Reagan knew how to tell people what they wanted to hear, and that’s always dangerous.

The former president’s ultra-capitalist ideology is at the heart of Sean McNamara’s mediocre biopic Reagan – a simple account of his life and his anti-communist obsession, starring Dennis Quaid – also comes through The apprenticeAli Abba’s controversial approach to counterfeiting 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 in the role of the corrupt homosexual and homophobic lawyer Roy Cohn, a close friend of Richard Nixon, who worked under the patronage of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunt have learned everything.

Even if it’s not a great movie, The apprentice points to the seeds of the monster: the racism in the family, the dirty tricks that led to his real estate fortune, his pathological megalomania, and the long shadow of a mentor he ultimately disowned. Trump, in his usual heavy-handed, all-caps style, has lashed out at his creators, particularly his screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, who hides behind the memory of his late wife Ivana Trump. But the essential part of Sherman’s script (according to Abbasi, which was rejected at the time by Clint Eastwood and Paul Thomas Anderson) is that it points to Cohn as the person who instilled in the young Trump 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 equate the candidate who thought he was Robert Redford with Frankenstein, is far from as pithy as Johnny Depp’s 2016 cartoon Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The MovieDirector: Jeremy Konner. This crazy satire consists of skits featuring everything from the alien Telemuppet Alf to Doc Back to the futurerescues a supposedly lost home video, shot from start to finish by the tycoon himself, who recounts the same beginnings to a group of children on the day of his 40th birthday 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 JD 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 now evoked through a series of films that explore an identity of lost values. Francis Ford Coppola, who like so many members of the New Hollywood generation built his filmography on the schizophrenia of the American dream, has sought a way out of the labyrinth in a work that is itself also labyrinthine. Megalopolis. The experienced filmmaker can be accused of an excess of openness in his utopian recipe, which is based on a paradox: his protagonist, a visionary and misunderstood architect, is anchored in it The fountain head (1949), King Vidor’s classic by Ayn Rand, based on her own novel, whose individualistic ideas found their best interpretations especially in the 1980s and in characters like Trump.

In contrast to Coppola, newcomer Sean Price Williams characterizes a different kind of chaos, namely excessive cynicism about his country’s political panorama The sweet east, a tongue-in-cheek account of the folly of the conspiracy theories prevalent in America today, through the journey of initiation of an apathetic and opportunistic teenager, played by Talia Ryder. The sweet east is particularly interesting in its portrayal of an enlightened white supremacist (Simon Rex), who at one point in the film complains about “this meanness perpetuated by European condescension, which portrays us as a young country full of naive people.”

It’s a strange reflection given 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 the unrest of the First World. It’s a road movie starring journalists – including a veteran war photographer played by the phenomenal Kirsten Dunst – with horrifying scenes like the one in which Jesse Plemons plays the leader of a supremacist militia that executes Asians, blacks and Latinos.

Anti-immigrant discourse (a key theme in Trump’s campaign) is also the focus of veteran Errol Morris’s new documentary. Separated. Based on the book by Jacob Soboroff, it was presented at the Venice Film Festival and released a few weeks before the election as a clear warning about the Republican candidate’s unimaginable policies. Morris, a fundamental voice for understanding his country – in American Dharma (2018), he conducted 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 classic films – this time delving into a harrowing episode of the former president’s time in office. Based on an investigation that also includes the testimony of repentant officials, the documentary tells how, starting in 2017, more than 4,000 children were secretly separated from their parents while crossing the Mexican border without registration. An illegal and traumatic strategy that still causes pain today: There are still 1,300 “orphans” who could not be returned to their families due to a lack of data.

One of the big uncertainties of this election is whether Trump will follow through on his threat of mass deportations if he wins. Given what we saw in 2020, will he accept the results if he loses on November 5th? Unfortunately, the Fordist idea of ​​triumph in defeat does not seem to suit the Republican candidate. I wish he would show the strength of Spencer Tracy when he loses The last hurrah and asks his loyal 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 and remember: everything is fair in love and war.” And then Tracy begins to swim against the current of his rival’s supporters.

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