Can The Donald go Hollywood?
Unfortunately, Hollywood will never create a great American movie about Donald Trump.
Joey Shagoury is an undergraduate at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he studies world politics.
Movies are a uniquely American medium. No country is more serious about their films and television than the United States. American movies are a cultural phenomenon across the world, that is, they are how we present our country for better or for worse. The world forms their notions of what it is like to be an American through our movies. So this brings to mind an important question: How “cool” is Donald Trump — a quintessential American icon — allowed to look in the new biopic The Apprentice?
Perhaps this seems a little silly question, and it is, but not for the reasons you think. Trump is too well known not to have his own movies or biopics, but he is also too disliked by Hollywood to be depicted fairly. I saw The Apprentice on opening night and I actually recommend the film because I feel as if the good outweighed the bad.
The film has killer 1970s and 80s aesthetics and a soundtrack that refreshingly recalls you to the era. There is a collection of great scenes which will make you feel the emotion, courage, and zeal of Trump’s rise to the top. The acting is also superb. Sebastian Stan does a fantastic job portraying Trump. He does not appear as an impressionist.
The first half of the film depicts Trump relatively kindly and fairly before he “becomes” The Donald. The film is upended when Trump suddenly “turns bad.” From then on, it starts dumping baseless negative traits on Trump. He becomes a “monster” at this juncture, a character the filmmakers want you to hate. He is given no redeeming qualities and the humor the film produces decreases as well.
The director wants you to stop supporting the character you were pulling for in the first half of the film. They produce a particularly grizzly scene involving Ivana, which she and the family totally deny.
Trump is not depicted as an antihero in this movie either because that would go against the consensus that he is irredeemably evil, bad, mean, and totally not funny ever. You see the problem. There will never be a great Trump movie because it is impossible to depict him in a way necessary to create such a classic American story. There are murderers and criminals depicted more sympathetically than Trump in the second half of this film.
Hollywood cannot allow you to have any connection with Trump, so they destroy his image in the end. They built a character only to destroy all of his connection with the audience, echoing what they have done to the real Trump today. It is impossible to cover Trump fairly in a movie, which you could do even with a liberal bent, but that itself is unfathomable. Unfortunately, there will never be a great American movie about Donald Trump.
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