Weiner is thankfully more than a punchline. Though it’s not afraid to sound the snare and cymbal on occasion. This rip-roaring documentary about the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign of estranged Congressman Anthony Weiner does more with the man than it does with his name. The scandal is obviously hard to avoid: Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 in the wake of a Twitter sexting scandal where a lewd photo was seen posted to his public feed. The film picks up in 2013 when Weiner, a now social and political celebrity pariah, announces his intentions of running for mayor of NYC. Muddled intentions abound, yet co-directors Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman follow the campaign’s ins-and-outs aptly enough to present an indubitably warty yet endearing portrayal of a public life in our ultra-mediated age.
Watching Weiner is like scrolling through a social media newsfeed or a compendium of BuzzFeed “breaking news”: it’s erratic, urgent, ridiculous, hilarious, and deeply sad. At times it’s so overwhelming that it feels like Anthony himself will jump off the screen at any moment. Steinberg and Kriegman fill this thing full of dense facets through which to view this man. There are moments of charismatic montage full of joy that show the public, on-the-ground side of Anthony. He interacts with the people of NYC with such a passionate, caring poise it’s impossible to believe he’s a disingenuous bottom-feeding politician (which I don’t believe he is). The camera also frequently visits his home, pressing past the artifice of a People magazine spread. He and his wife are in fact married. They do have a child. There is play and banter and love and care. When his wife Huma states in public that she has forgiven him, there is evidence of that in the home despite the evident psychological weight of the scandal. The familial intimacy brings shade and shape to Weiner.
But, there is always the camera. The phone. The Twitter and Facebook feeds. Technology stalks Weiner’s world much like it does our own. When more women come forward with stories about Anthony’s come-ons, even after his resignation, his surging candidacy takes a nosedive. And it reverberates throughout the Weiner camp: the campaign office, his home and family life, his own thrilling presence. It doesn’t help that he is often glued to his smartphone or watching his own interviews online.
Weiner is a man of a suffering duality. There’s the people’s Weiner and there’s the Weiner at home. But the giant of this film is the mediated Weiner. “Carlos Danger” – his sexting alter ego after his stint as a congressperson – is the alter-ego and the villain of his existence. Though it’s undeniable that he loves the limelight, it is also his destruction. One fantastically edited sequence shows him shooting a campaign ad after the backlash of “Carlos Danger” coming to light. The ad is an attempt to bring the media back to the subject. It’s a call to get back to the campaign. Real footage from the TV spot is shown and then intercut with the documentarians’ filming that ad itself being filmed. It’s a frightening glimpse of a man fragmented by the camera’s gaze. The real Weiner is actualized in the lens.
The tragedy of it all is that Weiner is a man, identity, persona lost in the camera. This film is a document of a 21st century Jekyll and Hyde. His love and knowledge for NYC and its people is in constant conflict with the love of himself and camera.
And this gets to the heart of the film, the man, and the place of nonfiction filmmaking in the 21st century. Mediated celebrity doesn’t have the luxury of the Eddie Mannixes of the universe anymore. All things are documented. All things are seen. The underbelly of the celebrity image still lingers. Hollywood is still in the movies. It will never vacate them because the same broken world props it up. Weiner is a testament to and warning against that strange concoction of self-mediation, portrayal/performance, and perception that invades our lives through the screen. We want to be seen but we don’t necessarily want to be shown, revealed, unclothed.
Toward the end of the film, Kriegman asks Weiner from behind the camera why he let them film all of this. The voice offscreen, the omniscient, the observer wants to know why he was allowed this access. Behind the need to be mediated is the need to be known and to be loved. Weiner just wants to be seen and loved. And Weiner wouldn’t work at all if the man in front of the camera wasn’t worthy to be loved.