Friday, May 25, 2018

Alec Baldwin's Impersonation Is As Awful as the Trump Presidency Itself

Donald Trump is defiantly ignorant, stupid, amoral, indecent, inhumane, delusional, vainglorious, and incompetent, and, if you ask me, a fecal stain on American history. I must nonetheless confess that I regard anyone’s finding funny Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live nearly as disturbing as anyone regarding him as a viable president. 

I suspect there are few high schools in the country lacking a kid who could eat Baldwin’s lunch as a Trump impersonator. 

I've greatly enjoyed some of Baldwin’s serious work, none more than his spectacular Always-Be-Closing monologue in the movie version of Glengarry Glenn Ross. Given what I know him to be capable of, I sometimes dare hope it isn’t Trump he’s impersonating on SNL, but the least gifted, most obnoxious member of a high school drama club impersonating Trump. 

"Doing" Trump, Baldwin seems to  have forgotten everything he knows as an actor. It isn’t the actor’s job to judge the character he or she is playing, but to bring that character to life and let the audience decide for itself. To bring a character to life, the actor must suspend judgment and do his best to become him — to experience the world as the character does, to try to protect himself as the character does from the pain life can inflict . Baldwin does nothing of the sort, and is content with puerile mockery. His impersonation is all about Trump’s physical tics, but at least one, the endless lips-pursing, strikes me as more something Baldwin thought funny than something Trump actually does. 

As though we wouldn’t be able to figure out on our own that Trump’s The Great American Jerk without Baldwin's relentless mugging. 

Contrast this to Ricky Gervais’s sublime portrayal of the fictional character David Brent he created for The Office. Brent desperately wants to be admired, if not adored, and thought hilarious. But the harder he tries to endear himself to the world, the more disgustedly the world recoils. At the end of the series, in the sublime scene in which he finally removes his mask of breezy self-assurance in the wake of having been fired, Gervais shows us just enough of the poor devil’s terror and insatiable neediness to break our hearts. Finding no trace of humanity in Trump (and I’m not suggesting that’s easy), Baldwin is able only to make the least demanding of us snicker. He should be ashamed of himself. 

The writing on SNL is very much on a par with Baldwin’s acting — that is, almost inconceivably awful. Forget about the high school kids we were invoking a moment ago. I can’t imagine many middle school kids coming up with less funny scripts than SNL’s. That Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer (he who makes the final decision on which writers to employ), is widely viewed as American humour’s great arbiter is as ludicrous as viewing Donald Trump as a viable president. 

A free idea for SNL. Have Baldwin do his Glengarry Glenn Ross monologue as Trump addressing his Cabinet. One suspects it’s not terribly different from what the great man says in real life to his underlings. It’ll need a bit of rewriting, but I’m a phone call away. I envisage a Mike Pence surrogate licking the side of Baldwin-as-Trump’s face during the harangue. 


You’re welcome, Lorne. You'll find some of my own stuff here

No comments:

Post a Comment