My Son Hunter brings scruples to political satire.
How do you turn a political argument into a work of art? My Son Hunter is the answer. Political filmmaker Phelim McAleer takes up the subject that corporate journalists have snuffed out these past few years — the Biden family corruption exposed by its reckless scion Hunter. But McAleer avoids the accusation and recrimination now customary in the media. Hunter Biden’s criminal misbehavior captured on his own two laptops is already self-inflicted character assassination performed with such compulsion that McAleer need only represent it conscientiously.
The FBI’s safeguarding of the debauched and felonious Biden evidence — and Big Tech’s effort, with the media, to discredit it all as “Russian disinformation” — is an unprecedented breach of public trust and a denial of liberty. So McAleer’s film serves a muckraking, restorative function. (Produced by Breitbart, it’s been predictably slammed or ignored by the corporate press.)
“This is not a true story — except for all the facts,” says a snarky Secret Service agent/narrator (Gina Carano), whose hair was just sniffed by the current POTUS. But this satiric jest is the film’s only slant (a preening quirk eventually dropped). The rest is a painstaking — even revelatory — frolic through the personal relationship of Hunter and his father Joe. It shows insular, implicit venality to be an observable family trait, in a clan where bonds are based on disingenuous fealty.
Make no mistake, McAleer is polemical, but My Son Hunter doesn’t condemn Hunter Biden so much as understand him and the nature of his offense — thus demonstrating the ultimate form of journalistic scruples.
Unscrupulous media keep everything strictly partisan (twisting our country against itself). This was also the infuriating failure of Adam McKay’s political hit jobs The Big Short and Vice, which boasted the narcissistic pseudo-sophistication of “high-info” (activist) journalism. My Son Hunter is better by virtue of recognizing the cloud of distortion that covered the “mostly peaceful protests” preceding the 2020 election, then using those events to introduce Joe (John James), Hunter (Laurence Fox), and Grace (Emma Gojkovic), the showgirl-activist who becomes his concubine and confidante.
Actor-turned-director Robert Davi uses this farce structure for nuanced behavior and moral fantasy. After Hunter snorts cocaine at a party, his cartoon heart expands, then he relaxes by smoking crack. When bribed by China’s largest private oil company, his eyes turn into cartoon moneybags. But these comic effects are balanced by each performer’s expert raillery: Joe taunts, “Oh, come on, man! What kind of moron forgets to pick up his laptop?” and Hunter corrects, “Actually, it’s uh, two laptops.” Beltway vaudeville.
These father–son exchanges create surprising insight that official photo-ops miss. While James, as “Big Guy” Joe, actually looks more like Dick Cheney, Fox’s Hunter is uncanny: Scruffy with a thin meth face, always on the verge of exhaustion or indignant profanity — a hurt reflex. No exonerating network-TV interview has captured Fox’s naked pathos. Davi achieves an ideal scrutiny of family dysfunction when Hunter tells Grace about his late brother Beau: “You would have liked him. He was the good one. Everybody thought he was going to be the attorney general of the United States. I am the one who brings in all the deals. I provide futures for aunts and uncles.”
This dynamic justifies the title’s resemblance to Leo McCarey’s 1951 masterpiece, the anti-Communist family drama My Son John. (Miranda Devine’s book already claimed “The Laptop from Hell” as a title.) Davi and McAleer recognize painful family rivalry of the Ordinary People sort — the sainted Beau versus Hunter, who admits, “I fell in love with his wife. Actually, I am a royal f***-up. No one can f*** up like I can f*** up.” Keeping sympathy for Hunter in check, screenwriter Brian Godawa finds a parallel for his Hollywood decadence: “John Belushi died in the next bungalow,” Hunter tells Grace, who responds, “That’s so sad. Who’s John Belushi?”
Grace’s subplot provides the film’s moral reckoning. A fellow activist complains, “Some people are too ignorant to understand complex moral issues. We choose truth over facts.” But Grace witnesses Hunter’s confession via flashbacks that resemble Goodfellas decadence — cultural complicity that’s more PG-rated than the sleaziness we know from the laptops, yet it moves Grace toward whistleblowing, her own act of contrition. This gives My Son Hunter more substance than what politicized publications such as the New Yorker or the Atlantic would do even if we still had writers with the New Journalism integrity of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.
McAleer and Davi display their own New Journalism integrity when tracing Hunter’s corruption to the media’s — covering for what is parodied as “Quick Pro Quo” deals, persecuting Donald Trump as public distraction. (“’Obstruction of Congress!’ What does that even mean?” Grace queries.) My Son Hunter climaxes with reenactment, then actual news footage, of Joe Biden at the Council of Foreign Relations bragging about the outrageous quid pro quo threat he had made against the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the energy company paying Hunter $80k a month: “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion dollars.’ . . . I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” It’s history worth remembering.
My Son Hunter gives a human scale to the inconceivable corruption we witness but that politicians and media tell us to ignore. McAleer and Davi realize the moral lesson of the Godfather trilogy and apply it to our great political scandal, as David O. Russell was unable to do in Amsterdam. That they found talented actors to be sympathetic artists and that they risk trusting American moviegoers suggests that all is not yet lost.
