When Anthony Weiner, former Democratic congressman and disgracee of a humiliating sexting scandal, began his candidacy for Mayor of New York City in 2013, it's doubtful he could have ever predicted the political car crash(es) that would ensue. Yet what's remarkable about Weiner - a fly on the wall documentary directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg - is that, even when the eponymous figure is at his lowest, being attacked and humiliated by almost every news program and paper, he refuses to turn the cameras off. We are granted such unprecedented insight into the behind-the-scenes workings of a scandal that, at times, we almost can't believe what we're seeing.
When Anthony Weiner giggles over his disastrous appearance on the Lawrence O'Donnell show, when he goes into a meltdown in response to a Jewish man's comments at a deli, when he is smuggled into his own campaign headquarters via a McDonald's elevator to avoid the woman he sexted with, it's not hard to imagine that this is an elaborate mockumentary written by Armando Iannucci. But it's not. It's real. And it's fascinating.
Does this mean it's any good? Not good in the subjective sense - it's some of the most fun I've had at the cinema this year - but good in the more objective, well-made, worthy-of-praise-and-possibly-Oscar-nods sense. Well, yes and no. Yes, it's almost perfectly edited, and yes, it tells a clear and compelling story that bears relevance to the wider world. Yet in the days after seeing it, I began to wonder if it was not a great political documentary, but simply one of the most lucky films to have ever existed.
When Kriegman and Steinberg began filming Weiner, they couldn't know what was going to happen. They took an opportunity and seized it, and were able to film some stunning footage. But by the definition of "fly on the wall", they didn't make the footage, nor did they engineer its outcome. They filmed what was there, what was granted to them by an unapologetic narcissist with outsized political dreams.
Throughout most of the film, then, it feels like Kriegman and Steinberg were not the directors of their own film: Anthony Weiner was. He knew he was being filmed throughout the entire journey, and this almost certainly affected his behaviour. The film opens with his rant in congress against the Republicans who tried to block healthcare for 9/11 first responders, which subsequently goes viral. It's his skills as an orator and political grandstander that are, without question, remarkable. It's just the rest of his personality that gets in the way. And he is so obsessed with his own image that, in spite of O'Donnell asking, "What's wrong with you?", in spite of the knowledge that he will lose, he continues in his Sisyphean quest, to the expense of his career, his personal relationships, and his marriage to Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
A few weeks ago, I saw Notes on Blindness, Pete Middleton and James Spinney's remarkable documentary that semi-dramatises theologian John Hull's diaries about his descent into blindness. I say "semi" in that, much like Cleo Barnard's The Arbor, it takes the recorded voices of its subjects and has actors re-enact them via lip sync. But unlike Barnard's film, the artifice is less pronounced; at times, you almost forget that it is Dan Skinner on screen, not John Hull.
Both the strengths and weaknesses of Middleton and Spinney's film derive from the fact that it is less a documentary and more a creative response to a document. They cannot imagine what it was like inside Hull's head, nor do they try to. Instead, we get almost abstract compositions - a set of fraying photographs, a perfectly white bout of snow - that at least try to simulate the emotions associated with blindness.
Much like Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, or Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing - or even Rufus Norris' London Road, another piece of trendy verbatim-cinema - there is a conscious blurring between documentary and fiction, that makes you question whether these boundaries even need to exist. At the same time, though, there is a question of whether the documentary has a greater duty towards realism than the fictional piece. Audiences going into a film will likely know whether it intends to be factual or fictional; to make a film purporting towards the factual but executed with a rather liberal creative instinct could, potentially, be misleading, even dishonest. As much as I loved The Act of Killing, it was Oppenheimer's companion piece The Look of Silence that I considered the greater work, in that it was less geared towards cinematic spectacle and more towards individual, personal truths.
Taken on these terms, then, Weiner is the most realistic form of documentary, in that it offers an unvarnished insight into a man spinning his own fiction. While every image, every sound, every juxtaposition between the two is a creative choice in of itself, it seems difficult to tell this particular story any other way, so clear was its trajectory. Does this make it better, worse, or simply different to the kind of documentary that attempts to actively instigate something new, to explore and participate in the world instead of simply filming it? Should capturing life at its most "real" be the first priority in these endeavours, or can augmenting it with fiction allow the work to reach greater heights of "real" than would first be imagined?
I don't really answers here, except that I'm reminded of a shot in John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Ford wanted to film a cavalry procession through Monument Valley, and he did so to the backdrop of an approaching lightning storm. Neither Ford nor anyone else predicted the storm's appearance - and yet, it remains an integral part of the film's mise-en-scene. Nowadays, it's likely such a shot would be re-created with CGI. But because of its circumstances, does Ford's scene feel more true to life? If so, who's the real author of that shot? Does it matter?
