One of the most entertaining political documentaries of recent times is Weiner. In 2013 leading Democrat Anthony Weiner let a couple of filmmakers follow his efforts to get elected mayor of New York. Politicians aren’t immune to vanity, and presumably Weiner banked on some friendly coverage from this documentary crew. Instead Weiner got caught up in a sexting scandal, and the filmmakers were there, to chronicle the campaign in meltdown in all its intimate detail. It’s an excruciating spectacle: the story Weiner so assiduously tried to manage spins out of control, and the film impresses not as the record of one man’s triumph but his sorry political obituary.
The Final Year is a chronicle of the last 12 months of the Obama administration’s foreign policy team. All credit to director Greg Barker for securing behind-the-scenes access to the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry as they jet across the globe in a frenzy of diplomacy, but you sense the White House kept him on a tight rein. This is no Weiner.
Sure, you get a vivid feel for the atmosphere of the White House in the months and weeks leading up to Obama’s departure. There is an unholy rush to secure his foreign policy achievement legacy before leaving office: I lost count of the shots of people walking purposefully along White House corridors, like the cast in a season finale to The West Wing.
Barker has allowed himself to get caught up in the excitement. At one point we follow Kerry to the melting ice caps off the coast of Greenland, and he talks about global warming. It’s hard to disagree with any of it, but still it felt like a photo op engineered by the Obama administration.
The election of someone who opposes almost everything Obama’s team stands for does lend the film an injection of dark urgency
Elsewhere Obama fields questions from an audience of handpicked students in Vietnam. “You are a very great leader… Do you have any advice on how we can be great like you?” a young man asks him. Obama greets the questions with sly self-deprecation, but the attitude the film adopts is almost as adulatory. The image here is of an administration working towards a greater good, staffed by men and women powered only by conviction and Coke Zero. It’s commendable, but makes for bland cinema.