The surest sign of a man’s iniquity is the contempt of his own family. When David Allen Marcus and Alice Marcus, estranged cousins to political fixer, villain, and unrepentant hypocrite Roy Cohn, sit down in front of Ivy Meeropol’s camera to reminisce about him in “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” they don’t bother dressing their feelings: David calls him the “personification of evil,” and when he opines that “every family has its Roy Cohn,” Alice gently replies, “Oh, I hope not. The world would be a terrible place if that happened.”
Truer words. There’s a sizable chapter of culture, whether pop or high, devoted to the study of Cohn as a person as well as a shiv stuck in the side of American history: Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” for instance, the 5th season of “The X-Files,” and movies ranging from “Citizen Cohn” to “Robert Kennedy and His Times.” More recently, Cohn served as the subject of Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” though Tyrnauer’s work lacks the personal investment Meeropol makes with “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn”: She’s a granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose executions were arranged and carried out in large part thanks to Cohn’s prosecutorial efforts in 1953.
The kneejerk reaction to Meeropol’s relationship to Cohn is to preconceive the film as a hit job, but this is nonsense. For one, Cohn’s determined awfulness is well established in the public record. Men like him aren’t unique to history, but among those men, he stands out for sheer remorseless calculation and self-advancement; there’s little he wouldn’t do to cement his position in American politics and society. For another, Meeropol’s father, Michael Meeropol, featuring here a handful times as a firsthand witness to Cohn’s most notorious crime, won small justice for his parents while appearing a guest panelist on a televised segment where he sat mere feet from Cohn, lay bare his corruption and wrongdoing in front of all watching and soaked in the satisfaction of seeing his foe squirm and fume on live TV.
So “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” isn’t really about justice, per se, but about peeling back the layers on the man. Meeropol seeks understanding. A natural part of that search is the pursuit of justice, certainly, and here justice translates to the second of a man long dead. If after all these years any question remained as to Cohn’s ambitions and intentions in life, “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” would settle them handily: He was an incredibly big piece of shit. What Meeropol does is avoid making the most cutting judgments, save for those offered by his cousins, and instead puts forth the facts of Cohn’s life. He wasn’t a good man, but he was a man, and a man in hiding who’d do anything to shine the harsh light of scrutiny anywhere other than where he stood.
In a strict sense, this makes Meeropol’s work here an act of empathy: There’s not much to Cohn that hasn’t already been seen, and what’s been seen of him is constitutionally hideous, and yet she sees him all the same. Meeropol converses with her father in a few scenes, and even steps in front of the lens at one point; these moments don’t lend the impression that she’s out to drag Cohn’s name through the mud (though mud would at least give his name some much-needed exfoliation). The work isn’t, however, an act of sympathy, because there’s no universe in which the descendant of two people killed for political reasons can look the killer in the eye and pity the son of a bitch.
Meeropol does give us reason to pity him; he died of complications from AIDS in 1986, which is a horrible way to go by anybody’s standards, and he died more or less alone because when you surround yourself with friends like Donald Trump, expect them to abandon you in your hour of need. Cohn’s choice of pals further robs him of being a truly sympathetic figure, and “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” dutifully connects the dots linking him to Trump, to Roger Stone, to Paul Manafort, and, perhaps of more immediate danger, to New York City’s mob families. Essentially, Cohn made a bed of snakes, which is surprisingly comfortable until you actually have to lie in it, but this again isn’t meant to humanize Cohn as much as to trace his full circumference.
Surveying a complicated figure necessarily produces a complicated movie, and “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” is indeed complicated. Meeropol’s filmmaking uncomplicates matters as much as they reasonably can; talking head interviews and archival footage rattle off details about Cohn’s misdeeds and associations at a fast clip, which makes casual viewing impossible. Granted, nobody’s going to tune into “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” for funsies; the information presented here, for the most part, isn’t new, but the perspective and proximity to the Meeropols’ life-shaping tragedy is new and adds vital urgency to the material. Not many people have the chance to face their nemeses. Meeropol’s dad did; the best she can do is delve through the past and create a portrait of Cohn with all the threads history has left her, including threads on the AIDS quilt.
Meeropol visits that haunting memorial with her father partway through the film and took the title from the inscription on Cohn’s own panel. Therein lies the contradiction of Cohn: He was a gay man rightly afraid to admit it, living in a period where gay men were victimized at best and vilified at worst by authoritarian brutes like Joseph McCarthy, and he tried his damnedest to avoid those fates whatever the cost. In the short term, he succeeded. In the long term, the truth caught up to him. Here, Meeropol does, too. [B]
“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” debuts on HBO on June 18.