If this year’s US presidential election has taught us anything, it is that celebrity or notoriety can be translated into electoral success. But it’s hard to see how that can apply to the imploding anti-star of American politics: Anthony Weiner, immortalised in the year’s most horribly watchable documentary, by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg.
Weiner was a talented Democratic politician who appeared to have overcome sex scandals from his time in Congress and was running for New York mayor. He was clearly a smart, vigorous, committed guy. But then he has to quit – a catastrophe which the film captures in real time – when it becomes clear he has not kicked his habit of texting and tweeting lewd photos of himself to women.
To make things more embarrassing, Weiner was married to Huma Abedin, the elegant and cerebral aide to Hillary Clinton. This documentary made Weiner a minor legend, and when Donald Trump’s campaign did its best to publicise Clinton’s emails part of the purpose was plainly to bring Weiner and his errant weiner into the public domain, however indirectly. Did Huma figure that she could, like Hillary, stand by her man? At any rate, she left him after this film was released.
Weiner the documentary is a classic study of conceit and self-delusion, of a man with an almost fanatical reluctance to admit that something is wrong. And poor Weiner the man is really a classic case of sex addiction, perhaps the most obvious example ever to have exposed himself, as it were, for the movie camera.
