Weiner -- Film Review

Weiner

Directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg

This is not a documentary as it bills itself, but is rather a promotional infomercial for New York politician Anthony Weiner.  It is made like a home movie by people who were involved in his political campaign.  A very poor quality effort.  The film is self indulgent, masochistic, superficial, lacking in insight, and amounts to an orgy of American bad taste and cultural trash.  I didn't really want to see this film.  We had come to the theater expecting to see something else, but it happened to be sold out.  My friend wanted to see this, so I reluctantly agreed.  I knew this wasn't going to be any good, and I was right.  But it turned out to be much worse than I expected.  I was ready to leave after about twenty minutes. 

The film reduces American culture to its lowest common denominators and serves it up like fodder in a hog trough to provide some shallow titillation to the masses of ignorant morons who don't have lives of their own and who make up the bulk of our society.  American politicians do not understand the perversity of our sexual culture and accept it at face value.  They don't know how or why it got this crazy; they don't realize that it can change, that it can be different, and that it has been different in the past.  They are thus always being burned and bloodied by it.  They know it is ridiculous, but rather than challenge it, they simply try to exploit it to  their advantage while maintaining a pose of hypocritical self-righteousness on the one hand, and masochistic self-abasement on the other, if they happen to find themselves on the wrong end of it.   Weiner falls into the tradition of Bill Clinton, Elliott Spitzer, Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, John Edwards and many, many others.  I find it vacuous and rather boring.  It belongs on television.