Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
2003 will never seem so long ago as when you watch the documentary Born Rich, and in particular the parts of Born Rich where Ivanka Trump is interviewed about her life of privilege. The film, directed by Jamie Johnson — of the Johnson & Johnson empire — was a look at the lives of the children of wealth. Massive, massive wealth. Heirs and heiresses to the Condé Nast and A&P fortunes; children of Vanderbilts and Bloombergs and European royalty; filthy, filthy rich. It screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2003, before premiering on HBO later that year.
Of the dozen rich kids profiles in the film, Ivanka Trump was probably the most widely known, even if hers was just a name people remembered from tabloid stories about her parents’ divorce. This was still a year before Donald Trump re-entered the American consciousness with The Apprentice. Still, Ivanka — who was 22 when the film came out — comes across as incredibly poised and articulate. There’s a degree of grading on a curve with her, in that when she doesn’t come across as boastful as her father, she feels almost doubly humble. She is by far at her most relateable as she is showing off her childhood bedroom full of the same kinds of embarrassing teen-crush posters a lot of us had on our walls. Of course, that relateability only lasts as long as the camera doesn’t pan around to the view out her window.
The irony of the film is that it often plays like the introspective phase of a poor little rich boy like Jamie Johnson, looking to justify or apologize for his life of privilege. Whatever the motivation, though, the film is wildly watchable, particularly for the car-wreck quality of the kids who feel particularly brazen when talking about blowing off their Ivy League educations or finding conversations about careers gauche (because they don’t work, see). In a pre-Real Housewives world, Born Rich was what we watched to get a window into the awful world of privilege.
Ivanka comes across better than a lot of her contemporaries in the film in that she doesn’t say anything overtly offensive. But there’s still that blinkered, Trump-ian view of the world. She talks a lot about how proud she is of her parents, of the Trump name, and how she wants to follow her father’s footsteps into real-estate development. But one story in particular — a clip that was used in the Funny or Die film The Art of the Deal … the Movie — feels the most telling:
“I remember once, my father and I were walking down 5th Avenue, and there was a homeless person sitting right outside of Trump Tower. And I think I was probably nine, ten something like this, it was right around the time as the divorce. And I remember my father pointing to him and saying ‘That guy has $8 billion more than me.’ Because he was in such extreme debt at that point. And me thinking ‘What are you talking about?’ He was sitting outside of Trump Tower, and I didn’t understand. I just thought about it a year or two ago and thought it interesting. It makes me all the more proud of my parents that they got through that.”
[Born Rich is streaming on Hulu … and you should definitely watch it.]
