The Hilariously Dated 2003 TV Movie Rudy: The Rudy Guliani Story Depicts the Disgraced Former Mayor as a Batman-Like Hero and Enemy of Evildoers Everywhere
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’m so old I remember when people actually respected Rudy Giuliani. At the height of his powers and his popularity the former mayor of New York wasn’t just respected. He was revered. He was idolized. His career was romanticized and idealized.
In some circles Giuliani wasn’t just seen as an unusually fearless and effective mayor: he was seen as the hero who took on the mob, Wall Street and impoverished black men trying to clean the car windows of strangers in his bid to clean up New York City.
There’s a reason the term post-Giuliani exists. There is a widespread belief that before Giuliani took over New York was a crime-ravaged hellhole, albeit one with a lot of spirit and soul. Then Giuliani took over, Times Square became Disneyfied and violent crime plummeted, albeit at a steep cost to the city’s spirit, soul and personality.
Giuliani’s “success” was predicated largely on racism and police brutality but that only endears him to Conservatives and the MAGA crowd even more.
The former mayor and current walking punchline embodies the famous line from The Dark Knight about how “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
It’s almost too perfect that that eminently quotable bit of dialogue is delivered by Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, who begins the film a crusading hero of the legal system intent on bringing down bad guys who becomes super-villain Two-Face.
Giuliani was similarly a crusading hero of the legal system intent on bringing down bad guys at any cost who became a super-villain, albeit an extremely incompetent one, due to his lust for power and money and reputation-destroying career as Donald Trump’s legal lapdog.
The hero of 9/11 became one of the primary villains of the January 6th kerfuffle. A man once idolized as “America’s Mayor” is now America’s Clown, a drunken, horny buffoon intent on destroying what remains of his legacy.
Giuliani’s latest public humiliation came when a former employee named Noelle Dunphy sued the sleazy piece of shit for ten million dollars for sexual harassment and abuse. Dunphy brought the receipts, as the young people say, and recorded some of her interactions with her boss.
The transcripts for these recordings include Giuliani saying charming things like the following to a woman who worked for him: “Come here, big tits. Come here, big tits. Your tits belong to me. Give them to me (indiscernible). I want to claim my tits. I want to claim my tits. I want to claim my tits. These are my tits. These breasts belong to me. Nobody else can get near these, OK? I don’t care if they’re flirting or they give you business cards. These are mine, you got it?” he continued. “Understand? I’m very fucking possessive. I’ve gone easy on you.”
This of course comes on top of the humiliations of January 6th, the travesty that was the Four Seasons press conference and getting hoaxed by Sacha Baron Cohen’s team in 2021’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
Giuliani’s endless fall from grace makes the fawning, achingly reverent 2003 USA television movie Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story seem not only wrong but unintentionally comic and surreal.
Rudy doesn’t just treat Giuliani as an American hero; it portrays him as Mayor Batman, a Dark Knight-like figure of truth and justice and a foe to evildoers everywhere.
In a manipulative move designed to highlight Giuliani’s heroism during the defining moment of his mayoralty, we are forever flashing back and forward to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Rudy takes the maxim to never forget very seriously and very literally.
The fawning hagiography flashes back and forth between the aftermath of 9/11 and moments from Rudy’s life as a hard-charging lawyer with political ambitions.
Considering the role he would play in compromising our democracy by feeding into Donald Trump’s delusions that he won the 2020 election it’s ironic that the movie opens with Rudy wearily accepting that he’s lost the mayoral election and would be succeeded by Mike Bloomberg.
Rudy’s driver, who talks to him like a peer because Rudy is a true man of the people, tells Rudy that he’ll be back, just like his personal hero Winston Churchill.
The disgraced former Attorney General sure would be back but it would be better for everyone if he had disappeared completely from public life immediately after losing the mayoral election.
We then flash back to the early 1980s, when Rudy is using his slick charm to woo journalist Donna Hanover (Penelope Ann Miller), a woman he would cheat on repeatedly.
The attractive blonde is understandably impressed with a man who always knows what to say and what to do.
When she marvels that Rudy used to be a Democrat and asks why he made the change, Rudy replies sagely, “Democrats always talked about things getting better. Republicans did whatever they could to make them better.”
The TV movie treats these words as both deep and incontrovertibly true. We don’t just have to take Rudy’s word for it; over the course of ninety minutes we get to see Rudy making things better for New Yorkers and the world.
As United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Giuliani puts the bad guys on notice. In a characteristically worshipful sequence, he inspires and terrifies the lazy, complacent, deeply inferior jackasses working for him by informing them that their lives are about to change dramatically with a rousing speech.
Woods’ Giuliani sternly informs his staff, “We, gentlemen, are about to unleash the dogs of war against drug dealers, war against the Mafia—and yes Mr. Hoover there IS a Mafia—against corrupt politicians and stockbrokers, against crooked judges and bent cops. How, you may wonder, do we end corruption? By scaring the shit out of the criminal, and their families, if we have to…This is New York City. I love this city. This is the greatest city in the world, and I am going to make it safe for people to live in again, so help me God.”
He does just that! Oh sure, race-baiting narcissists like David Dinkins and Al Sharpton stand in his way and the way of progress by complaining about racism and police brutality but he just steamrolls righteously over them, knowing that he is right and the people complaining about racist police are a bunch of whiny babies.
In Rudy the former mayor is a genius who sometimes swears and gets angry and curses people out but only because he cares so damn much about his city and his country but he is also a true man of the people who loves the New York Yankees just as much as he loves opera.
Rudy continually lays on the soaring strings when Rudy talks passionately in a way that conveys both his rightness and his heroism.
It isn’t until the third act that Rudy finally acknowledges that its protagonist did more than clean up New York, defeat the mafia and keep New York from sinking into an emotional abyss post-9/11.
Because it is a matter of the public record Rudy has to concede that Rudy Giuliani is a horny-ass dude whose raging libido led him to cheat on his long-suffering wife with a woman who began as the family babysitter before being given a position of power as a top aide based primarily on his lust for her.
Having just cringed my way through an article where Rudy refers to a employee as “Big Tits” as well as his “whore” and his “slut” I imagine that the actual relationship between horny Rudy and the sexy baby-sitter turned advisor was actually way grosser than the film is willing to concede.
That still is somehow not enough for Rudy. So he cheats on the former babysitter he was cheating on his wife with with Judith Nathan, who would go on to become his third wife.
Isn’t it crazy that Rudy was once against corrupt politicians and corruption in general? What could have happened? I’m guessing it has something to do with him being utterly and completely corrupted by his relationship with Donald Trump and also never being that good of a guy in the first place.
Rudy implicitly argues that yes, its hero was a shameless sexual harasser and cheater but isn’t that forgivable in light of all the good that he’s done?
If you were to make a movie about Rudy Giuliani today it would have to be a savage satirical comedy about a man who had it all, including the public’s respect and adoration, and lost it all because he couldn’t control his demons or his vices. Also, he needs to lay off the sauce.
Giuliani has the drunk story to end all drunk stories. He once got so wasted that he convinced a man who had lost a presidential election that he had actually won and that with a little luck would be staying in the White House for another four years. AT LEAST!
It’s an understatement to say that this heroic portrayal of Giuliani has not aged well. Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story is a movie about a man who no longer exists, if he ever did, and has been replaced not by a hero but by a monster.
Check out The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
I’ve also written multiple versions of my many books about “Weird Al” Yankovic that you can buy here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace