The Japanese distributor of Ali Abassi’s origin story of Donald Trump The Monster probably thinks they’ve scored a coup by releasing it the weekend before Trump’s second term as POTUS begins (it opened in the U.S. about a month before the election last fall), but I would argue that such timing is fraught. Obviously, releasing it after Trump reascends Olympus would be even dodgier, box office-wise, but at this point in the ever-expanding Trump news cycle the public, even non-Americans (especially non-Americans?), are already sick of the guy. It’s just as well that the movie comes across as a comedy, a kind of exploitation flick that’s as crass and crude as its protagonist. The difficulty is not that the truth about Trump’s subsequent success in the clear light of his perfidy makes all the jokes pointless, but that the man himself has no depths to plumb. It’s all there on the surface, which means the movie’s humor is stretched paper-thin from the get go.

The title, of course, does not refer to the reality show that revived Trump’s celebrity, but rather to his status vis-a-vis the ultra-aggressive lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who in the 50s coordinated Sen. Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting escapades and sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, a feat that he, at one point, cites as his greatest achievement. (to paraphrase: “They said spare her, she’s a mother. I said, fry her, she’s a traitor.”) When they meet, Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is a relatively naive but ambitious real estate developer still under the thumb of his emotionally abusive slumlord father, Fred (Martin Donovan), going door-to-door to collect rent payments from struggling tenants. Donald enlists the blustery Cohn to quash a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Trump organization for housing discrimination. Cohn takes the challenge and effectively blackmails a DOJ official into settling the suit without any penalty. Recognizing that young Donald has the potential to be a shark just as lethal as he is, Cohn endeavors to groom the kid into the narcissistic bloviator we know and hate today, though the script by Gabriel Sherman focuses on two circumscribed time periods—the mid-70s, when Trump was just building his business empire, and the mid-80s when he was a qualified (all that debt!) success and Cohn had withdrawn from the picture because of AIDS—without giving much of a sense of how Trump developed in the meantime. Essentially, Cohn teaches him the ropes in the first half (Attack! Deny! Never admit defeat!) and we see him utilize those teachings in the second, though, in fact, as Trump himself confesses at one point, this ruthless, immoral attitude seems to have been part of his nature from the start. Along the way, Sherman and Stan drop all the cues that have come to define Trump, especially in his behavior toward his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), whom he starts to resent once she proves to be as effectively ambitious as he is; and his cruel dismissal of his loser older brother, who dies an alcoholic. 

That said, Stan’s performance is more than a good impersonation, and it’s easy to wonder how much better the movie could have been were the script as inventive and insightful as the actor. Strong is even better as Cohn, but only in the first half, poisonously combative and predatory, whether it’s in the courtroom or the bedroom. He tends to fall into Kendall Roy habits in the latter part of the film, when Cohn is weakened considerably by his illness. Too much of the dialogue is geared toward confirming what we already know about the two men and doesn’t really add anything useful, which isn’t to say Donald Trump is unknowable. If anything, he’s too knowable, which is the problem. As funny as the movie can be, in the end it’s just way too depressing. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

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photo (c) 2024 Apprentic Productions Ontario Inc./Profile Productions 2 APS/Tailored Films Ltd.