Weiner, and the elephant in the room.
At the end of Weiner, the credits roll and Netflix does that annoying thing where it minimises the film you were engrossed with into the size of a postage stamp to advertise your next binge. Whether someone at Netflix has a great sense of irony or whether it’s deft algorithmic work, ‘Get Me Roger Stone’ is advertised — it would act as terrific double header.
The elephant in the room, throughout Showtime’s documentary on Anthony Weiner’s doomed 2013 comeback campaign, is Donald Trump. Weiner’s talent for exposing his semi-erect loins semi-publically constantly draws the ire of the tabloid press and eventually lays waste to everything he has worked towards, while Donald Trump’s more contemptuous but less exposed behaviour leaves him unscathed. It begs the question; is the public more incensed over exposed flesh, or is it simply that Trump is more adept at ignoring the fire on his doorstep?
Trump parallels aside, Weiner — the film — is a triumph of access. The filmmakers, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, could never have envisioned the extent to which their film’s narrative would spiral out of control. There is an energy to Weiner that comes from a palpable sense of the filmmakers reconfiguring the story in their heads from one moment to the next; at once a redemptive story of pure, unrelenting charisma, the next a disaster movie, an excruciating portrait of self-destruction and ego run amok.
In the past, documentary has been the medium through which those sat comfortably on comfortable chairs look down and peek inside the lives of the less fortunate; the poor, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. Films that look the opposite way are rarer and Weiner is certainly a prime example of this, even as events in the past year have added further coarse brush strokes to Weiner’s already tattered public image.
Josh Kriegman is a former staffer on the Weiner campaign team turned documentary filmmaker and perhaps his LinkedIn profile goes some way in explaining the level of access they are afforded, but not completely. Weiner’s wife is Huma Abedin, a key cog in the Hilary Clinton machine and whose close relationship with the also-ran is a point of contention towards the end of the documentary as Weiner’s behaviour threatens to overspill and sour Abedin’s career as well as his own. Kriegman and Steinberg’s cameras linger in the corner as Weiner and Abedin’s marriage crumbles. We are there in the mornings, as Abedin prepares breakfast, her face emotionless and shell-shocked from another revelation. We are there as Weiner dissects his latest television appearance, trying to determine whether it will save his reputation or act as the final knockout blow.
At one point, close to damnation, Weiner orders his staffers out of the room for some privacy with his wife. After a cut, somehow, there we are, still in the room, moving closer to the scene of the crash as Abedin tries to work out whether the latest betrayal has been processed in marriage counselling or whether this is a new injury from which she must recover from. And the camera lingers. We bear witness to further chunks being cut out of these two individuals trust in each other.
Part of what makes Weiner so engaging is that the protagonist is fully aware of the power the filmmaker, and the camera, wields. A seemingly insignificant scene in the final third of the movie would otherwise be innocuous, but it’s inclusion in the edit is almost akin to Kriegman or Steinberg reaching for the remote, pressing pause and turning to the audience with a look that says, ‘Seriously I have no clue why this is happening. I don’t know why this was allowed, but it just was, alright?’. We are travelling next to Weiner in the back of a taxi to a campaign event as his life unravels. Kriegman asks Weiner a fairly innocuous but rather pointed question with the innocent enthusiasm of a child who has snuck into a theme park. For the first time, Weiner reacts, questioning why the filmmakers aren’t following the old-school practice of fly-on-the-wall documentary filmmaking. It is almost as if Weiner is realising too late that a further disaster awaits when Kriegman and Steinberg finish their edit.
This is a deft political character study and a subtle inspection into why individuals are comfortable with their private lives so brutally and wilfully exposed by documentary filmmakers. Were the film tackling a different topic one might get the first signs of sweat on the back of the neck, vision extending outwards from the monitor as you start to wonder whether this orgy of surveillance has breached some moral boundary. Ultimately, it doesn’t.
Weiner paints a professionally damning but rather sympathetic picture of its protagonist and yet, strangely, for all the drama that unfolds during the film itself, it could be a documentary that comes to be defined by events after the cameras have finally left the room.
Weiner (2016)
Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg
Showtime Documentaries
Watched on Netflix
