Where's My Roy Cohn?

Where’s My Roy Cohn? *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Matt Tyrnauer.

 

Roy Cohn was a malignant force in America for decades. He made a name a for himself while he was still in his early 20s – as the prosecutor of the Rosenbergs for being spies, and used that to become Joseph McCarthy’s right hand man in his communist witch hunt. When that ended, he moved back to New York and entered private practice, where he was the fiercest, most corrupt lawyer around. He would do anything to win, was indicted multiple times, and was finally disbarred late in his life. He would represent any and every one. He plays the press to get the stories he wanted out there. Although a registered Democrat, he worked with the Republican party, helping to get all sorts of people elected. He counts among his protégés Donald Trump and Roger Stone (only the later sits for this doc). He was Jewish and gay, and hated both of those aspects about himself. He would die of AIDS in the later 1980s, insisting the whole time that it wasn’t AIDS, and he wasn’t gay.

 

Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn (a Trump quote – as he wants someone like his old mentor fighting in his corner) is certainly not the flashiest of docs. It’s fairly dry – a lot of talking heads, and old archival footage, and has no new information about him in it – so if you already know, and revile him, you won’t learn anything new. And if you wanted to get to know the person he really was, you’d probably be better off watching Angels in America – Tony Kushner’s masterpiece of a play (that became an excellent HBO miniseries – Al Pacino plays Cohn in that one) in which Cohn is a main character. The Roy Cohn in that can say things that the real Cohn never would in public.

 

And yet, I think the documentary does a good job of giving a brief overview of Cohn – and just what made him such wretched force in American life – one whose impact is still felt today. Obviously Tyrnauer knows this – even before he introduces Trump in the documentary, he plays up the ways that Trump’s playbook mirrors what Cohn did – use the press, because they’ll quote you in the headline, and no one reads beyond that, claim victory even when you’ve lost and on and on and on. You can see just what Trump learned from him.

 

There is a difference though – Cohn was incredibly smart and well-spoken. He hated many aspects of himself, and had some issues with his mother he never resolved, but he was in many ways an evil genius. When you watch the film, and the things he did just keep piling up, you almost have to admire him – for just how horrible and underhanded he was. This isn’t even really a controversial opinion – many of Cohn’s cousins are in the film – and they loved him, even if they disagreed with them, but know exactly who he was. Even Roger Stone seems not to counter the premise that Cohn was an evil genius – he admires him all the more for it.

 

Cohn is probably alone in the fact that he helped shape American life from the 1950s right up until today – from McCarthy to Trump, and much in between, Cohn’s legacy has been felt even though he’s been dead for decades. This film gives you an insight into why – it has a lot of great footage of Cohn himself, spinning right until the end. The film does, to a certain extent humanize Cohn – in particular when they talk about his closeted homosexuality (almost everyone was in the closet in Cohn’s generation) – including the McCarthy Army hearings – which essentially ended McCarthy’s career, and Cohn’s as his right hand man. The people who attacked back were right – of course – but also said such horrifically homophobic things about Cohn (coded, of course, as they would have been) that you understand why Cohn stayed in that closet. That doesn’t excuse his behavior of course – but it does make Cohn into a human being, rather than a monster. And there is value in that.