Weiner
Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg (2016)
This is the latest high-profile documentary of recent years to end up with a story dramatically different from what the film-makers expected when shooting began. (The Queen of Versailles and The Armstrong Lie are others in the series.) Anthony Weiner was elected for seven consecutive terms as a Democrat Congressman in New York before his resignation in 2011, in the light of a sex scandal that involved his sending lewd photos of himself from his public Twitter account to women he’d met online. Weiner launched a comeback by running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York in 2013; Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg started making a fly-on-the-wall documentary about his mayoral campaign. Weiner is riding high in the polls until the emergence of evidence of his online sexual activity after his resignation from Congress. His poll ratings plummet; he’s encouraged by some advisers to pull out of the race; but he keeps going to the bitter end. (He finished fifth, with a measly 4.9% of the vote, in the primary election poll topped by Bill de Blasio.) And Kriegman and Steinberg – except for just a couple of occasions when Weiner asks them to leave the room – keep the cameras rolling. One of their questions prompts him to remark, with witty irritation, that he didn’t expect flies on the wall to be so talkative – but Kriegman and Steinberg seem as surprised by their continuing access to behind-the-scenes Weiner as most viewers of their film are likely to be. Late on, we hear Kriegman’s voice ask, ‘Why have you let me film this?’ There’s no direct response to the question from the leading man. Weiner, in effect, invites the audience to supply its own answers.
Anthony Weiner is evidently a narcissist-masochist and foolish in ways that only a clever person can be. He’s determined to win arguments and highly satisfied when he does so, without seeming aware of quite how Pyrrhic his victories are. With the new sexting firestorm raging, he does a live television interview with the political journalist Lawrence O’Donnell and wipes the floor with him. Back home, Weiner watches the interview on playback and delightedly analyses his triumph – although the whole context of the exchange with O’Donnell seems inevitably damaging and Weiner’s disputative relish makes matters worse. On the campaign trail, he gets into an argument with a heckler in a Jewish deli. Weiner overpowers this adversary only in terms of noisy invective: he shocks the other man by the force of his anger but the latter, sticking quietly and doggedly to his conviction that someone who’s done what Weiner’s done shouldn’t be running for public office, is rather impressive. We hear as a postscript to this showdown a claim on a news report that what started it was a sotto voce racist insult from the other man, who jeered at Weiner for being ‘married to an Arab’. If that’s true, you think better of Weiner’s hot-headed reaction – as a rare instance of his trying, however cack-handedly, to do right by his wife, Huma Abedin.
Abedin, born in Michigan to parents who emigrated to the US from India and Pakistan (so ‘Arab’ is pushing it), is the woman of whom her boss Hillary Clinton said that, if she’d had a second daughter, ‘Huma would be that daughter’. Weiner, twelve years his wife’s senior, launches his mayoral campaign with Huma at his side: she tells the media they’ve managed to get through a difficult time in their marriage and that she believes her husband is the best man to run New York. Weiner expects Abedin to continue devoting herself to the role of loyal candidate spouse regardless – of the revelations that derail his campaign, of her own busy political job as Clinton’s right-hand woman. (The year 2013 may have been an intermission between the end of Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State and the launch of her Presidential campaign but Abedin was still very active at the time, in work for the Clinton Foundation etc.) Weiner’s determination to keep telling his wife what she ought to be doing gives added poignancy to Huma Abedin’s long-suffering, increasingly silent dignity. (The closing legends on the screen inform us that she and Weiner separated after further sexting revelations came to light around the time the film was completed.)
Weiner remains similarly in charge in discussions with his shocked campaign staff. He appears to see it as his leadership role not only to issue instructions but also to raise spirits, even though he’s the cause of demoralisation. He has a habit of raising a thorny subject then sliding away from it, as if articulating an issue is as good as wrestling with it personally. He muses on whether people are drawn to political careers to compensate for an inability to sustain satisfying close relationships – to ‘make contact’ with people – in their private lives. He suggests at one point that what drives him to engage in online sex is the same part of his make-up that enables him to weather the ensuing scandals. He doesn’t say what this quality is although it’s hard to see it as anything other than pathological self-interest. At the end of Weiner, in spite of everything, he’s still playing to the camera.
Asked to summarise the reasons for his downfall, Weiner replies, ‘I’ve a funny name, I lied, and they don’t do nuance’ – ‘they’ being the news media. It’s not clear how press and TV ‘nuance’ would have helped in this case but he’s right about the other two things; and the bizarrely apt names in the story – names you’d never believe if this were fiction – don’t end with his own. Weiner sexted in late 2012 and early 2013 under the alias Carlos Danger but the correspondent/co-respondent in the affair really is called Sydney Leathers. Although she’s physically imposing (to put it mildly), you’re not convinced of her reality even after you’ve seen Leathers. Her human reality, that is: she’s irrefutable as a tabloid self-creation and self-publicist. She may have the look of a cartoon dominatrix but Leathers presents herself as a wronged woman, though not in the traditional sense. Her passion is for politics and Anthony Weiner was her political hero; her tragedy was the discovery that her hero’s anatomical features included ‘feet of clay’. In fact, Leathers is hugely pleased with herself: the film achieves a startling polarity between her grinning face and Huma Abedin’s stricken one.
Kriegman and Steinberg open with a montage of archive film that speeds us through its subject’s political rise and fall up to 2011. The exaggeratedly rapid editing and the music on the soundtrack suggest a madcap comedy to follow. The film is sometimes grimly funny, especially in the climax, on the day of the Democratic mayoral primary. Huma-less Weiner seems to spend much of the day wheeling their young son’s buggy round New York streets: the child appears to symbolise the only conventionally endearing thing the candidate may still have going for him. As night falls, Sydney Leathers attempts to confront Weiner in person, with a camera crew in tow. His team gets wind of what’s afoot and farcically frenetic efforts to prevent the encounter happening eventually succeed. The symbolic charge of this episode is stronger even than that of the child in the buggy: Weiner’s nemesis arrives from cyberspace to run him to earth in the real world.
Weiner made depressing viewing, largely as a result of when I saw it. The film was screened in British cinemas this summer but I watched it in the BBC 4 Storyville slot, two days before the Presidential election. The emails that sparked the renewed FBI investigation announced in late October were reportedly sent by Huma Abedin and obtained from a device belonging to Anthony Weiner. (As it happened, the news that the FBI had finished trawling through these emails and found no reason to change its earlier conclusions about Hillary Clinton broke on the BBC website a matter of minutes before Weiner aired.) Donald Trump makes only the briefest of cameo contributions, via a news clip (‘We don’t want perverts in New York!’), but I found him haunting the film – because anxiety about the Presidential election was uppermost in my mind, and because of resonances between Trump and Anthony Weiner. Those resonances include similarities and differences between them. Both are native New Yorkers with pejoratively suitable surnames. Weiner’s political views, as summarised in this film at any rate, are as appealing as Trump’s are appalling. Many Trump supporters felt the ‘You can do anything’ tape didn’t matter and it wasn’t long before he and his team were diluting the expressions of regret: you wondered if they were worried contrition might actually be a vote-loser. Kriegman and Steinberg show a few Weiner supporters angrily insisting that what the candidate does in his private life is irrelevant to his public one. We watch other people looking as if they enjoy seeing him – and being seen with him – in the street: now he’s so notorious, Weiner is a bigger celebrity. This comparison shouldn’t be pushed too far, of course. If only Donald Trump had received 4.9% of the vote on 8 November 2016.
6 November 2016