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The insanity that is the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign has often seemed like the stuff of a particularly absurd movie, so it was inevitable that Trump’s story would be turned into a particularly absurd movie. Enter the folks at Funny or Die, who have put together an all-star adaptation of Trump’s The Art of the Deal. The story of a real estate mogul who wouldn’t let rivals, renters, art preservationists, or first wives stand in his way. And as Donald J. Trump himself is Johnny Depp, nearly unrecognizable beneath makeup and a wig.
Depp’s Trump isn’t quite the self-satisfied and pompous Trump of Saturday Night Live impersonations. In The Art of the Deal: The Movie, Trump is a forceful, maniacal, delusional embodiment of manifest destiny, and the 50-minute film sees Depp doing some of his best work in a while as Trump blazes a trail through New York City real estate and mows down the likes of Merv Griffin (Patton Oswalt) and former New York City mayor Ed Koch (Henry Winkler). (Between Griffin, Koch, and Roy Cohn, played by Paul Scheer, it starts to seem that Trump’s journey was populated solely by famously closeted figures of the 1980s.)
The entire film is a marvel of 1980s video effects (there are some fantastic montages here) and any number of tropes from the biographical hagiography genre. You’ll be forgiven if you can’t stop thinking about “A Burns for All Seasons” from The Simpsons. But it also manages to nail some real punches about Trump’s history, from strong-arming rent-controlled tenants to defacing public art. Will it have any effect on Trump’s candidacy in 2016? No. But Trump’s become such an oversized part of our lives lately that this feels necessarily cathartic. And it is a pretty great showcase for Johnny Depp.
The last decade or so of Johnny Depp’s career has been a bizarre one. You wouldn’t think that a role as cartoony and makeup-dependent as Trump would be enough of a departure from his disappointing retreat into Tim Burton caricatures. But as this year’s Black Mass showed, just because Depp takes on serious material doesn’t mean it’s suddenly going to be quality filmmaking. The line between Depp as Whitey Bulger in Black Mass and Depp as Donald Trump in The Art of the Deal is thinner than you’d expect at first glance. But while Bulger was a grotesque in a movie that called for a human being, Trump is a grotesque in a movie that only needs Depp to go as far over the top as he can. It’s a wild success.
At 50 minutes, The Art of the Deal is a commitment, the kind you don’t normally have to give over to an internet short. But it’s worth it, if only to wait for appearances by ALF, Doc Brown, and Depp’s fellow SAG nominee Jacob Tremblay.
[You can stream The Art of the Deal: The Movie on Funny or Die.]
