Weiner
Opens Friday, June 17, at Tampa Theatre. It opens wide July 20.
Long before the name "Anthony Weiner" became synonymous with the seven-term congressman who accidentally tweeted a picture of his junk, it already was a punchline. Watching Weiner, the discomfiting and Sundance-winning documentary from Motto Pictures, there's one particular classic joke that comes to mind, usually attributed to the vaudeville duo Smith & Dale:
PATIENT: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
DOCTOR: Then don't do that.
Which is to say that Weiner, bright and talented though he may be, is undeniably the source of his own pain. Granted unprecedented and nearly unrestricted access to the embattled pol's 2013 comeback attempt in the race to become mayor of New York City, filmmakers Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman (a one-time Weiner staffer) document that pain in excruciating detail, over and over and over again.
A viewer goes into Titanic certain of one thing: In the end, the boat's going to sink. One goes into Weiner similarly certain of its ignominious conclusion. The iceberg — in this case, fresh revelations that Weiner continued sexting with strangers even after his public apologies, even after he resigned from Congress — arrives just one-third of the way through the doc's running time. For the remaining hour, we follow the candidate's slow descent into the icy waters of defeat, until the ultimate denouement: Anthony Weiner and his elegant wife, Huma Abedin, on their way to give a pitiful concession speech, being chased through a McDonald's back alley by a porn star and her entourage of cameramen.
"What is wrong with you?" MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell asks Weiner, in one of the more awkward cable news interviews in history, and the film at various points attempts to posit an answer to that question. This particular scene cuts between the public's view of that interaction — with two heads in a box on a television screen, O'Donnell's wearing a glib smirk as his subject has a full-blown meltdown — and Weiner's own, sitting alone in an empty New York remote studio, raving impetuously at an off-screen monitor. Later that evening, when Weiner insists Abedin watch the segment with him, we see the horror on her face at the notion that she has married a man who could possibly think it went well.
In his public proclamations, Weiner insists that the reason he got back in the game, the reason he would subject himself and his family to further humiliations, is that he's driven by his commitment to ideas ("64 of them," he notes in his debut campaign commercial) to help the middle class. The behind-the-scenes belies that notion, as it becomes clear that what's really driving him is personal redemption:
"She was very eager to get her life back that I had taken from her," Weiner says of his wife, "…to clean up the mess I had made, and running for mayor was the straightest line to do it.”
The Weiner on display in Weiner is obsessed with bullies, whether they be the media or political opponents or random voters on the street who hurl insults his way.
"It's easy to beat me up. I don't respect it," he says after one such encounter. He's talking about his public scandal, but one gets the sense he could be talking about his whole life as a skinny, gawky kid with a funny name and a big mouth.
Of course, Weiner doesn't just stand up to bullies: He actively seeks them out and, in the process, becomes one himself. Remarkably thin-skinned, he is nonetheless compelled to seek the adoration of people he already knows don't like him. Like the ouroboros snake swallowing its own tail, this most narcissistic of egos ultimately consumes itself.
Witnessing that process from this close a focus can be a tough slag. It is, nonetheless, utterly gripping from start to finish. Which raises perhaps an even more difficult question: what, indeed, is wrong with us?
This article appears in Jun 16-23, 2016.