Retro Film Review: Get Me Roger Stone (2017)
Old adage about history being written by the winners is one that, ironically, doesn’t bear much historical scrutiny. Perspectives on many historical events are often shaped by the losers, mainly because losers, unburdened by the fruits of victory, have more time to write books and also tend to have more incentive to explain what went wrong. It is rather easy to predict that the very same phenomenon will be applied to the 2016 US presidential election, with books and documentaries being almost exclusively written by supporters of Hillary Clinton. One of the rare examples that tries to portray those events from the winning side is Get Me Roger Stone, a 2017 documentary by Dylan Bank, Daniel Di Mauro and Morgan Pehme.
Donald Trump, however, isn’t the protagonist of the documentary. The filmmakers instead opted to portray Trump’s campaign from the perspective of one of its arguably ephemeral participants. Yet Roger Stone, as portrayed in this film, is anything but an ephemeral figure. The 64-year-old veteran Republican political operative is a well-known name to those better acquainted with US politics, who also happens to be among the most controversial and most flamboyant players in the political arena. The film is structured as a combination of Stone’s conventional biography and a day-to-day chronicle of his activities during the campaign. Stone’s early years, as presented in the film, are as fascinating as his present. The film depicts a passionate partisan whose tendency to engage in devastating dirty tricks is matched both by great talent in executing those tricks and an even greater tendency to revel in a reputation as an arch-villain.
In two hours of running time, Get Me Roger Stone works as a history lesson, chronicling Stone’s career under Nixon, Reagan and G.W. Bush and reminding the audience of the most important political scandals in those years, some of which look shocking even after a few decades. In all of them, Stone played a certain part, which is something he actually likes to remind everyone. The film is also a valuable source for future historians, because it features interviews with some of Stone’s, often better-known associates, which include Donald Trump and Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Get Me Roger Stone is less successful when dealing with Stone’s present than with his past. The filmmakers try to make a case that Donald Trump was actually Roger Stone’s life’s project, and that he had worked since the 1980s to bring the flamboyant real estate tycoon into the White House. More sceptical viewers could argue that the filmmakers themselves came under Stone’s sway and gave the old political operative more importance than he objectively deserved. Nevertheless, the film is, just like Stone himself, fascinating and entertaining. It stops being so at the very end, when the actual fruit of Stone’s (or Stone’s less-known colleagues and comrades’) labour is presented in a brief montage of election clips with an emphasis on leftists’ and Hillary supporters’ meltdown. Such an abrupt ending, regardless of the audience’s partisan affiliation, leaves much to be desired. On the other hand, due to the relationship between quantity and quality, histories written by losers are more likely to be better than histories written by winners.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
(Note: The text in the original version was posted here.)
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