Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg had the kind of access most documentary makers never get, and they used it to make something funny, horrible and hard to look away from. What they did not do is work out what they think of the man they were watching.
Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg followed Anthony Weiner through his 2013 campaign for Mayor of New York and were still filming when it fell apart. Kriegman had worked for Weiner in Congress, which is how the camera got through the door, and the result is 96 minutes of a kind we rarely see: a politician, his wife and his staff filmed while something goes badly wrong, with no publicist standing between them and the lens. It is gripping, it is often funny, and it never decides what it is for. We recommend it anyway.
The film opens with Weiner at his loudest, shouting on the floor of the House in 2010 over a bill for the emergency workers of 11 September, and then with the late-night jokes that followed his resignation a year later. Kriegman shot it himself, mostly from the shoulder, and he stays close: the back seat of the car, the kitchen of the flat, the corner of an office where Camille Joseph, the campaign manager, and Barbara Morgan, the communications director, try to keep the day on schedule. The early stretch is a comeback film and Weiner is good at it. He waves flags in parades, charms a room of pensioners, and climbs in the polls while the staff start to believe in him.
Then the new messages surface and the film becomes something else. Eli Despres’s editing is the reason it works. He cuts between the television coverage and the room where the people on television are sitting, so that we watch Weiner watch himself, sometimes with a small smile he cannot keep down. A press conference is intercut with the staff standing behind a door listening to it. The pace picks up as the campaign loses its footing, and Despres knows when to hold on a face and let nothing happen. Jeff Beal’s score is used sparingly; most of the sound in this film is television, and that is the right decision.
Huma Abedin is the person we could not stop watching. She says very little. There is a scene in the flat, after the news has broken, in which Weiner talks and she stands at the counter looking at a point somewhere past him, and the look goes on long enough that we wanted the camera to turn away. It did not, and neither did we, and we have not felt so plainly ashamed of watching a documentary in some time. Kriegman and Steinberg never comment on this, but each time Abedin asks whether the camera has to be there, and she asks more than once, they are telling us they have thought about it too.
Weiner himself is a remarkable subject because he does not know how to be filmed badly. He explains himself in car journeys, quick and funny and always a step ahead of the question. He is most alive in a shouting match with a man in a bakery, which he then watches back on a laptop and plainly enjoys. The staff around him, Amit Bagga and Barbara Morgan in particular, are shown doing the quiet, awful work of a campaign that has stopped being about policy, and the film is kind to them without saying so.
What the film does not do is think. It has a case to make about the press, that the cameras chase the sex story and ignore the housing plan, and it makes the case and then makes it again; Weiner makes it himself, which rather takes it out of the directors’ hands. The harder question, why a man who had already lost everything once did it again, is put to him once, in the car, and he says he does not know. The film takes him at his word and moves on. A documentary this close to its subject needed either to press him or to find the answer in the footage, and it does neither.
The campaign films it descends from, Primary (1960) and The War Room (1993), were about how an election is won. This is about how one is lost, and it is better on how than on why. Watch it with someone who follows politics, because the argument afterwards is half the evening, and watch it at home, where you can look away when Abedin does.
