If the presidential campaign stirs your appetite for still more political noise, here’s a quick solution: Catch the new biopics of Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan. Trump calls the movie about him “a hit job”; Reagan likely would find his biopic a sleeper. (Oops, wrong kind).
Is there an audience for political movies? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that two movie stars known as policy activists instead have created caper films for the popcorn crowd, or the streaming subset.
George Clooney glibly glides through Wolfs, co-starring Brad Pitt, while Matt Damon ambles through the chaos of The Instigators, co-starring Casey Affleck. The paydays are formidable, but their Tomatoes will whither on the vine.
But then political movies always have had a troubled history in terms of impact and accuracy: One helped obliterate an entire studio regime, another triggered a bitter creative feud. But none became a major audience hit.
Are stars today wary of movie polemics? Warren Beatty enjoyed stirring outrage with Bulworth (1998), but Robert Redford, cast as a dedicated young liberal in The Candidate (1972), failed to find an audience.
The resolute Redford soon won acclaim for All the President’s Men (1976), but his legendary scenarist, William Goldman, was so angry with the actor-producer that they never spoke again. Redford had made major changes in the script without telling Goldman (co-star Dustin Hoffman stayed out of the fight).
Beatty and director Alan Pakula triggered a corporate war within Paramount when their 1974 political thriller The Parallax View seemingly was shunted aside by the studio. Robert Evans, the studio chief, had points and producer credit in Chinatown. But since the Roman Polanski thriller opened within a week of Parallax, Beatty and Pakula argued that Chinatown had been awarded a much richer ad budget.
The conflict expanded with the revelation that Frank Yablans, then Paramount’s president, shared in Evans’ Chinatown profits. Barry Diller suddenly emerged as Paramount’s new studio chief as Evans and Yablans were ushered out.
By any standard, Parallax and President’s Men, both directed by Pakula, were vastly more nuanced and sophisticated than the two biopics opening this week.
The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, last week was denounced as “malicious defamation” by Trumpists. The film had struggled in finding a distributor until Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment stepped in.
Ortenberg had helped create a wide audience for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, another famously polarizing film.
The Apprentice elicited praise at the Cannes Film Festival and will open before the election, thus guaranteeing controversy. “It should not see the light of day,” declared Trump’s director communications Stephen Cheung.
It’s doubtful if the tame, if not worshipful, biopic about Reagan will stir similar controversy. Working under layers of makeup, Dennis Quaid depicts the late president as a folksy if fervent anti-communist crusader who faces down campus protesters before taking on the Kremlin.
I covered Reagan’s early political career during my time as a New York Times reporter and found him both thoughtful and warm-spirited.
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Still, Reagan the movie distorts its protagonist’s policies, starting with his reign as president of the Screen Actors Guild, continuing into his confusion about both the Black List and the threat of AIDS. Reagan himself might have been uncomfortable watching Jon Voight, a Trump supporter, cast as the narrator. He plays an aged communist spy.
“Let Ronnie be Ronnie,” Penelope Ann Miller’s Nancy Reagan repeatedly admonishes her husband’s advisers during the biopic, and I suspect that would have applied to the film. “Ronnie” might have agreed, had he been coerced into seeing the film. When Reagan was in a dark mood, his advisers would urge him to see The Sound of Music. He once confided to me that he didn’t like that movie either.