What if you got to follow a prominent, polarizing political figure around with a camera for a year and discovered mostly that he’s just a schlub who doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing?
You’d have the documentary The Brink, which wants to raise the alarm about the racist nationalism taking hold in Western democracies and instead makes right-wing strategist Steve Bannon out to be a bumbling, occasionally volcanic doofus who’s well-read but largely unable to assimilate information that doesn’t support his prejudices.
Which is not to say he’s not dangerous in the eyes of those who oppose his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-global agenda. But if he has a strategy deeper than spreading fearmongering propaganda, the documentary doesn’t reveal it. The historical moment has certainly buoyed him, but the film demonstrates that his reading of history past and present is remarkably blinkered.
Filmmaker Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) shadowed Bannon on and off from just after his August 2017 ouster from the Trump White House through the 2018 midterm elections. She captures a lot of disconcerting private moments as Bannon woos European nationalists and is himself wooed by struggling U.S. candidates, but she avoids any talking-head interviews apart from her subject. Dissenting voices come chiefly from a few ballsy journalists who challenge Bannon and a lot of audio lifted from news coverage of the events that most impact him.
The result is both revealing and discomforting. Bannon and his fellow nationalists come across as craven and generally uninterested in the lives of the common people they hope to appeal to, as well as in willful denial about the racism of their rhetoric. Still, a bull in a china shop is no less destructive just because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Now playing at Grail Moviehouse
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