#64: Weiner
Release Date: May 20th, 2016
Format: Streaming (Plex)
Directed by: Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg
3 Stars
This is the first documentary I’ve reviewed, and it’s a doozy. The filmmakers followed Anthony Weiner on his failed campaign for New York City mayor, and were allowed full access to his headquarters and his home, with his wife Huma and their 1-year-old son.
Don’t know who Anthony Weiner is? He used to be a rising star US Congressman from New York and a darling of left-leaning major media outlets. Now Anthony Weiner is a divorced former Congressman and a registered sex offender. Weiner finds Weiner post-resignation from Congress, but pre-sex offender status, when his life at 49-years-old has two distinct paths:
1) Winning the NYC mayoral race and realizing personal and professional redemption or
2) Failure in the form of a full-scale Shakespearian tragedy.
I’m sure by the divorce and the sex offender status, you can guess which path he chose.
What’s crazy is it’s all his fault. This is a talented politician whose ceiling was probably a Democratic Presidential candidate, but Weiner finds him in full Elmer Fudd-mode. In a fly-on-the-wall style, we watch him repeatedly pull the trigger of his shotgun only to hear a click, turn it around on himself, look down the barrel, pull the trigger again, and boom!
But again, what’s crazy, is there is no Bugs Bunny in the Anthony Weiner story. There is only Elmer Fudd. He only gets in his own way.
But in addition to Anthony Weiner, who is of course captivating, we also get several other compelling figures in the documentary:
There is the beleaguered communications director, Barbara, barely keeping it together.
We get “the other woman,” 23-year-old Sydney Leathers, who was the recipient of Weiner’s dick pics, and who secures the bag by doing porn and appeasing Howard Stern by trying to run into Weiner at his various campaign events in an attempt to embarrass him.
We get an unnamed campaign underling who frantically warns Weiner of Ms. Leathers trying to ambush him, and toggles between using her code name “Pineapple” and her actual full-name, Sydney Leathers. He also repeatedly slurps from an almost empty Jamba Juice cup. Just a classic stooge. I could have used more of him.
And we get Huma, the sympathetic, loyal, intelligent, and beautifully sad wife who gets dragged through the mud every step of the way (a note on Huma: she’s a former campaign director for Hillary Clinton, and after divorcing Weiner, went on to date Bradley Cooper and is now engaged to Alexander Soros, one of the five children of billionaire George Soros. In Weiner we see a sympathetic, if not victimized, Huma. But are we sure she’s not a Lady Macbethian character? At the very least she has a type (powerful), but might she be a seductress behind the scenes, climbing her way up in politics (Weiner), Hollywood (Cooper), and international finance and philanthropy (Soros)? She’s a compelling character, whoever she is deep down).
At the end, I have no idea who Anthony Weiner is. I don’t think Anthony Weiner knows who he is. And Weiner doesn’t know, either. And that’s probably the point.
