STREAMING CINEMA
Roy Cohn: Trump’s Bullying Coach
Rosenbergs’ granddaughter probes legendary evil closet case
BY STEVE ERICKSON
If eyes are windows on the
soul, you only had to look at
Roy Cohn’s to realize he didn’t
have one. Cohn’s dazed glare
refl ected his moral bankruptcy.
But even though he died in 1986,
his fl aws are connected to those
of our present. He was Donald
Trump’s mentor and partner in
crime. He’s had a funny afterlife,
fi rst as a fi ctionalized character in
“Angels in America” and last year
as the subjects of two documentaries,
Matt Tyrnauer’s “Where’s
My Roy Cohn?” and Ivy Meeropol’s
“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story
of Roy Cohn.” R.E.M.’s “Exhuming
McCarthy” plays over the latter
fi lm’s closing credits, but “Exhuming
Cohn” would be more fi tting for
our times.
The two fi lms competed with
each other for access. “Angels in
America” went unmentioned in
“Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” which
seemed odd until I saw “Bully.
Coward. Victim.” Meeropol’s fi lm
includes images of a 2018 revival
of the play and interviews with
Tony Kushner and Nathan Lane
(who played Cohn then). She has
a personal connection to Cohn.
Her grandparents were Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg. Her father Michael
holds Cohn responsible for
their execution after convictions
for spying for the Soviet Union,
which led to him growing up under
adoptive parents. Tyrnauer saw
Cohn as grist for his documentaries
about the hidden gay history of
20th-century American life.
“Bully. Coward. Victim.” begins
with the Rosenbergs and home
movies of her family. Her father
was a child when they were executed,
but he was a participant
in the ‘60s New Left and defends
the merits of the American Communist
Party and the Rosenbergs’
devotion to the USSR. The blame
he placed on Cohn drove him to
argue against the lawyer on a talk
show in the early ‘80s.
But Meeropol’s fi lm has a split
personality. It feels as though it
might have started out as a feature
Roy Cohn with Donald Trump at the opening of Trump Tower in 1983.
Roy Cohn at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1986, the year he died of AIDS.
length personal essay-fi lm
that got chopped up into its current
form.
Tyrnauer’s fi lm relied heavily on
video interviews with Cohn, while
“Bully. Coward. Victim.” turns to
audio, often played over still photos.
Very early on in his career,
Cohn’s role in the 1954 McCarthy
congressional hearings was captured
in Dan Talbot and Emile De
Antonio’s “Point of Order!” a decade
later. Even the brief clips Meeropol
uses reveal how gay-baiting and
jokes about “pixies” were once
considered fair game for the whole
political spectrum, as well as how
soon innuendo about Cohn’s sexuality
began swirling.
COURTESY OF SONIA MOSKOWITZ/ HBO
MARY ELLEN MARK/ COURTESY OF HBO
It’s impossible to make a fi lm
about Cohn in the current day
without Trump being the elephant
in the room. Cohn’s position as a
prophet of Trumpism — or Trump’s
as an inheritor of the venality and
open shamelessness of Cohn —
made up the subject matter of half
of “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
“Bully. Coward. Victim.” takes
a broader view but also keeps returning
to this, with the aid of
TV footage of the late, great Village
Voice reporter Wayne Barrett.
But despite Meeropol’s direct
ties to her material, hers is a fairly
straightforward documentary, telling
Cohn’s life as a public fi gure in
chronological order.
Like J. Edgar Hoover, Cohn was
a real-life version of the gay man
who turns fascist because he can’t
handle an adult life dealing with
his sexuality in Bernardo Bertolucci’s
1970 fi lm “The Conformist.”
Cohn’s Judaism also seemed
to make him determined not to live
up to any stereotype of the weak,
whiny Jewish-American. Instead,
he turned himself into a menacing
creep. “Bully. Coward. Victim.”
shows how he got an 18-month jail
sentence for Richard Dupont, who
published several issues of a ‘zine
mocking Cohn as a closet case.
If “Bully. Coward. Victim.” contains
plenty of worthwhile material,
it’s all mighty familiar at this
late date. Meeropol might have
made a better fi lm had she expanded
her focus beyond Cohn and
delved further into her family’s life.
We hear a lot about what her father
thinks about the Rosenbergs,
but her own opinions can only be
gleaned from the fi lm itself. “Angels
in America” was better at bringing
out the contradictions of her title,
which comes from Cohn’s place on
the AIDS quilt, where “Coward” is
sewn under a pink triangle.
As Cohn was dying of AIDS, his
buddy Trump abandoned him.
Cohn lived in a world where everyone
knew his secrets, both sexual
and political, and his presence was
tolerated, if not encouraged. You’d
expect John Waters to be repulsed
by Cohn’s presence in ‘70s Provincetown,
but the Hollywood and
media celebrities who lined up to
do coke with him at Studio 54 were
titillated instead and played along
with his pretense of heterosexuality.
Wealth and power have a way
of evening these things out. The
greater implications of that subject
are touched upon in Meeropol’s
fi lm, but as with the recent Netflix
series “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy
Rich,” neither seems quite as cutting
as the best fi ctional treatments
of oligarchy.
BULLY. COWARD. VICTIM. THE
STORY OF ROY COHN |Directed
by Ivy Meeropol | HBO, HBO Go,
HBO Max from Jun. 18 |HBO.com
June 18 - June 24, 2 32 020 | GayCityNews.com
/|HBO.com
/GayCityNews.com
