Opportunistic Hate Porn
Get Me Roger Stone, the new documentary by Netflix, seemed too good to be true – full access to the Trump-as-political-candidate progenitor Roger Stone, as well as interviews with Trump and Paul Manafort.
It seems an almost unbelievable, and certainly unforgivable, feat of laziness that the filmmakers wound up with nothing more than a film version of Stone’s Wikipedia page.
The thesis of Get Me Roger Stone has to do with finding a golden thread connecting Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. We are easily convinced of a link, but how much influence Stone truly asserted over any of these candidates is hard to gauge.
The talking heads in the documentary – plucked from the staff of the New Yorker to provide amateur psychological speculation – alternatively claim Roger Stone to be an evil puppet master, or someone simply pretending to be an evil puppet master. Sadly, by the time the credits roll, we are no closer to knowing the truth.
The whole thing is tell not show. Shadowing Stone has yielded no smoking guns or tabloid-ready footage, so the filmmakers turn to trite biographical montages (exhibit A: a montage about Stone peddling influence as a lobbyist set to "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straights), punctuated by slides of “Stone’s Rules” - a sort of conservative Sun Tzu for politikin' (e.g. “Hate is more powerful than love”). Wary of running short, the filmmakers turn back to the talking heads again and again (is it just me, or have we hit peak Jeff Toobin?). The heads run out of things to say almost immediately. Once in a while Manafort and Trump appear, but neither have much incentive to share genuine insight about the man.
Of course, we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought insight was Get Me Roger Stone’s purpose. If the subject were anyone other than a self-admitted Machiavellian and possible fascist, we would not hesitate to call the film lazy character assassination. As it stands, perhaps opportunistic hate-porn would be a better term.
The true winner here is - who else - Roger Stone. Posing gingerly in a pinstriped suit, a faint smell of perversion in the air, like if Lee Atwater were a character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he happily gets to deliver his own epitaph: “My name is Roger Stone and I’m an agent provocateur.”