Much of the documentary circles around their admiration for their father and their gratitude for his approval. “He used to sing to me when I was little,” Ivanka recalls, in a moment that approaches tenderness, until she acknowledges that her father “didn’t go to our sports games, that wasn’t his thing, and he was pretty unapologetic about it.” In glass-walled offices and palace-chic drawing rooms, Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric reminisce about growing up with Trump as a dad with some weird mix of awe and resignation. The parallels are on-the-nose: The chamber music over the opening credits feels like a note-for-note knockoff of the HBO score.
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Holder, it turns out, was thinking about the family dynasty in a slightly different way he told The Hollywood Reporter that his film was a psychological study with the “vibe” of HBO’s hit series “Succession,” about a Rupert-Murdoch-style media mogul and the bitter infighting among his adult children. According to the New York Times, the project was brokered by a former White House lawyer, and the Trumps agreed to take part because they felt that Holder, a relatively unknown British filmmaker from outside the Washington press corps, would capture and burnish the family’s legacy. In “Unprecedented,” by contrast, there is no behind-the-scenes: If the cameras are rolling, it’s a performance. (There’s plenty of warm banter between the 43 rd-president-to-be and Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, which feels dreamlike in this age of hyper-partisan hatred.) Bush campaign, shows the gulf between a malaprop-filled candidate and a relaxed politician who charms the reporters in the back of the bus. “Journeys With George,” Alexandra Pelosi’s film about the 2000 George W.
Pennebaker’s 1993 documentary, focused on the scrappy operatives snarfing popcorn and quashing scandals in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Political documentaries often try to reveal a difference between a campaign’s front-facing image and the truth behind the scenes. The rest of the documentary shows what happens when Trump finally had to confront the fact that the act isn’t always enough. In his long experience as a public figure, he’d always been able to will that image into reality. In order to be a winner, he had to present himself as a winner. In a sense, the series implicitly argues, that was beside the point. None of the interviews with Trump, for instance, suggest that he didn’t believe his claims of election fraud, but nothing suggests he truly did believe it, either. This, “Unprecedented” posits, was Trump’s approach to politics, too, and his attitude pre- and post-assault-on-the-Capitol. No matter what’s blowing up or shutting down or going bankrupt, it’s critical to look like you’re a giant success. As the documentary shows, long before Trump entered the political arena, when the family business was real estate and casinos and steaks and airlines, he cultivated his image in service to a single idea: In Trumpland, everything is gilded and perfect. It goes to show how hard it must be to be a documentarian, scratching at subjects who have been in the public eye since birth, practicing the art of presentation.īut even the Trumps’ great efforts to control their presentation here, to gloss over the post-election madness, reveals something about the family’s mindset, and the way they might have collectively approached 2020’s electoral defeat.
It’s all controlled and hyper-civilized, in contrast to what we know was really going in the White House in those post-election months: swearing, cajoling, renegade lawyering, entire plates of lunch thrown against the walls. Even Trump himself, once the undisputed king of Twitter all-caps, states his grievances with a calm and measured voice: “I assumed it would be a straight-up election and it wasn’t. and Eric decline to speak about the day the Capitol was stormed. Yes, Holder sits down with the Trumps for extended interviews and trails them into campaign events, but everyone is on guard throughout: cagey, polite, careful with their words. Despite the hype about deep access to Donald Trump and his three oldest children after the 2020 election - a possibility so tantalizing that it earned filmmaker Alex Holder a subpoena from the House committee investigating January 6 - there are few stunning revelations or exciting hot-mic moments. Spoilers first: When it comes to breaking news, “Unprecedented,” the new documentary series about the Trump family that’s streaming on Discovery Plus, is kind of a nothingburger.
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