arts & life

f i lm

Weiner

Anthony Weiner in a still from the film

The media takes

a match to the

combustible

politician in a new

documentary.

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

34 June 2 • 2016

C

ongressman Anthony
Weiner, for those who
don’t remember or have
a talent for tuning out the wave-
length or bandwidth by which
scandals are disseminated, rep-
resented Brooklyn and Queens
for seven terms before resigning
in 2011 following revelations of
sexting.
Two years later, the liberal
Democrat announced that he
was running for mayor of
New York. From that moment
through the election four
months later, former political
consultant Josh Kriegman and
producer Elyse Steinberg filmed
Weiner and his campaign.
The painfully candid feature-
length documentary Weiner
exists thanks to the extraordi-
nary access that Weiner and his
wife, Huma Abedin, granted the
filmmakers. What sets the film
apart is the number of cringe-
inducing moments deriving
from Weiner’s bluntly candid
and unfiltered behavior.
“We see many celebrity melt-

downs,” Kriegman says. “In our
film, you get to actually be in
the room while it’s happening.
What is that experience really
like, beyond the puns about his
name or the TV narrative?”
Weiner, which won the Grand
Jury Prize in the documentary
competition at Sundance, opens
Friday, June 3, in select theaters
in Metro Detroit. In addition to
its obvious relevance in an elec-
tion year, there’s another factor:
Adedin is a longtime aide and
adviser to Hillary Clinton.
The trip-wire in the cam-
paign, and the film, is the
“news” that Weiner’s sexting
didn’t end in 2011 as he claimed
at the time, but continued until
just before his mayoral cam-
paign. Although no actual sex
ever took place, the media —
from TV to the tabloids to talk
radio — embarked on a feeding
frenzy that focused entirely on
the candidate’s credibility and
morality while ignoring substan-
tive issues.
“As he says in the film, ‘Maybe

politicians are wired to need
attention,’” Kriegman says. “But
a lot of what he was working on
and fighting for was sincere and
authentic, and he really did care
about policy and problems that
he was trying to solve as a politi-
cian. It’s too simplistic to throw
one label on him either way,
which is the point of the film.”
“A significant point of the
film,” Steinberg adds, “is to show
how these simple questions —
‘Is it good for Hillary or bad for
Hillary?’ ‘Is Anthony a good guy
or a bad guy?’ — [can’t really be
answered]. We’re trying to go
beyond those binary questions
and have a look about our poli-
tics and where we are right now.”
While Weiner is poorly served
by his media interactions, he is
both at his best and his worst
when interacting with voters one
on one. Quoted early in the docu-
mentary as saying he despises
bullies, Weiner shows that he’s
capable of being one himself in a
contentious confrontation with an
observant Jewish man in a bakery.

But even this scene is open to
interpretation, for we later learn
that Weiner might have been
provoked by a slur about Huma’s
Arab-American identity.
“Anthony has a brash, at
times aggressive, in-your-face
personality, and it certainly was
a big part of his appeal as a suc-
cessful politician in New York
City,” Kriegman says. “I don’t
know if that’s exactly Jewish or
not, but there’s certainly an ele-
ment of his character that reso-
nated with New Yorkers in the
sense that he was unafraid to
mix it up on a street corner. At
one point, he said that’s nirvana
for him, standing on a corner
with a crowd of people and
everyone yelling at each other
about issues. Knowing him per-
sonally, I know that really was a
viscerally enjoyable experience
for him to engage in that way.”
Steinberg is a native New
Yorker while Kriegman grew up
outside of Boston and moved
to the Big Apple around 10
years ago. Their stated goal is
to prompt a debate about the
trivial, sensationalistic way that
the media covers civics, but the
two early-30-somethings seem
to be unaware that this is not a
recent development.
“We see this film as being
about more than one person
or one campaign,” Steinberg
says. “It provides a look at how
our politics have become about
spectacle.”
That won’t come as a shock to
most readers. Kriegman offers a
fresh take, however, on the pub-
lic perception of the issue that
ultimately defined and doomed
Weiner’s campaign.
“Anthony’s sexting scandal
was different than others,” he
suggests, “in the sense that he
was doing something that I
think for a lot of people, espe-
cially older voters, was not
just wrong — in the way that
prostitution is obviously wrong
— but actually fell into a cat-
egory of deviant. It was a kind
of sexual behavior that people
were not familiar with.”

*

