Movie Review: Get Me Roger Stone

Get Me Roger Stone *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Dylan Bank & Daniel DiMauro & Morgan Pehme.

Written by: Dylan Bank & Daniel DiMauro & Morgan Pehme.

 

To hear Roger Stone tell it, there is hardly anything that has happened in American politics since Nixon that he isn’t at least partially responsible for. Undeniably, some of that is true – as Jeffrey Toobin calls Stone in this film, he is the “malevolent Forrest Gump of American politics” – in that everywhere you look at some major political event, Stone is there – perhaps off to the side, but he’s there. Is he responsible for all of it – or was he just there? No one seems to be quite sure what Stone did and did not do – what is fact, and what is the Roger Stone produced legend of himself. One thing is for sure though – Stone has not been a force for good in American politics.

 

Stone became a Conservative as a young man – Barry Goldwater was his idol at one point – and during college, he took time off to help work on Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, eventually becoming the youngest person questioned by the Watergate Grand Jury, because, of course he was. Stone makes no apologies for his love of Nixon – he even has the ex-President tattooed on his back for God’s sake. His association with Nixon, oddly, never really hurt him – and he later became head of the Young Republicans, and then worked to get Ronald Reagan elected. During the 1980s – he founded a lobbying firm alongside Paul Manafort (yes, Trump’s campaign manager) – where they specialized in dirty politics – taking money from dictators and warlords, and helping to clean-up their image. That made Stone a lot of money. It was in the 1980s when Stone met Donald Trump – and tried to convince him to run for President. When Trump eventually did run for President, Stone was there of course – a couple more decades, a sex scandal cannot slow down Stone. He was more of a fringe figure by then – going on Alex Jones, pedaling his Clinton rape book and shirts, and right there supporting Trump the whole way. He was on and off the campaign more than once.

 

To say that Stone is a sleaze isn’t really an insult to him – he relishes it. He wants you – the person watching the documentary filmed by what he calls “lefty filmmakers” – to hate his guts, because that means he’s effective. He knows how to appeal to dumb people, and how to get them to come out and vote. He doesn’t believe most of what he says – because he doesn’t have to. He just needs to convince others that it’s true, or muddy the water so much that they cannot tell what is true and what isn’t. In short, Roger Stone is one of the reasons we hear so much about “Fake News” – he invented it.

 

Or, at least, that’s what he wants you to think. He wants you to think that he’s responsible for everything – Reagan winning, the election of George W. Bush, the fall of Eliot Spitzer, the rise of Trump. When the Democrats win, it’s because he was sidelined – like during the 1996 election, when a sex scandal got Stone ousted from Bob Dole’s campaign (in the interest of being fair and balanced, it doesn’t seem like that bad of a sex scandal to me – I mean he and his wife were caught advertising for swingers to join them, so he wasn’t even cheating on his wife). He’s too much of a loose cannon, too in love with the spotlight to be a man in the shadows type like Karl Rove. If Stone’s not on TV somewhere, he’ll wither up and die from lack of attention.

 

The film follows Stone over a period of many months, leading up to Election night, when Donald Trump stunned the world and became President. It does provide some moments with Stone’s family – his wife, daughter and granddaughter, and Stone himself talking about the side of him we don’t see – the private side, the husband/father/grandfather. Thankfully, there’s not much of this (just the right amount) – not because I don’t want to view Stone as human, but because it really doesn’t matter what his private life is like – it matters what he does in public, which is really to debase the American political system. That’s he’s nice to his granddaughter doesn’t really matter in the face of that.

 

The film is an important documentary for 2017. I’m sure the filmmaker thought they were making a different film when they shot it – a look at how close America came to the brink of electing an idiot, based on the sleazy politics of Stone. That film would play as a warning, and perhaps a relief. The one they made is different – an entertaining tragedy. Because no matter what you think of Roger Stone, they man is entertaining to watch – even while doing so makes your stomach churn.