American Dharma

Quite a good film and the cinematics make it more watchable than if it was just a standard interview type format. For such a vilified character he doesn't seem that bad and is at least open to debate. It's striking that much of Bannon's political ideology seems to come apart under the gentlest of questioning and he almost seems acutely aware of that. Can't help feeling as a result that there is something more going on and that his politics are perhaps more a surface manifestation of some deeper psychological aspect. The film leaves that aspect largely unexplored.

An exquisitely made documentary, in which Errol Morris gives Steve Bannon just enough rope to hang himself. No doubt many would prefer to see Bannon more thoroughly and decisively skewered (which wouldn't be hard), but Bannon is smart enough not to participate with any documentarian who would do that. Instead, Bannon engages with Morris and collaborates all-too-willingly with his conceit of drawing parallels between Bannon's political machinations and his favourite Hollywood classics. The approach neatly underscores Bannon's essential narcissism, while giving him a framework within which he can both expound his political views and reveal himself, both proudly and inadvertently. As the consequences of this current wave of populism - and, more specifically, Trumpism - continue to unfold and blight the world, American Dharma is likely to become an increasingly important document of one of the movement's most important architects. With Trump now defeated (at least electorally) Morris probably needs to re-visit Bannon for his more unvarnished views on the presidency he engineered. Maybe they could call it Dharma and Dumber.

A debut of American Dharma in North America was released in Toronto Film Festival when I firstly saw it. It's a great chance to to hear what the director's opinion about Bannon, the role of this documentary, who was the executive operator of an American media and famous for being Trump's advisor during his campaign. Although the movie describes Bannon objectively, the director seems has nothing in common with Bannon's stand points and feels some kind of unacceptable about some thoughts such as Bannon compare his departure from Trumps' team to Lucifer in Paradise Lost. Actually, this documentary is an epitome of 2016 Trump's presidential election period. What makes me feel curious is the reason why Bannon compares himself to honey badger.

Seen at idfa 2018. The description on the idfa site got me really curious into this movie. However in my opinion the film did not deliver the promise of being "an horror story about a fascinating villan, too dangerous to ignore". However that may be actually true, this film did not leave that decision up to the viewer. And though it was beautifully crafted, it was overdone. To me the film felt artificial and thus had not the impact it could have.

As somebody who read the news during the Trump administration, nothing here surprised me, unfortunately. Apart from Morris' occasional polite interjections that Bannon seemed incoherent or self-contradictory, there were few breaks in the progress of Bannon's grandiose self-identifications with film characters played by Gregory Peck and John Wayne. These slow-moving bloviations, made unsuitably elegant by Morris' editing and use of famous film clips, take up much of the film. Morris does say, a few times, that Bannon's use of terms like "populism" and professed sympathy with "working people" make no good sense, considered alongside his endorsements of an unregulated marketplace, the absolute liberty of corporations to profit and pollute, and no clear vision of how breaking the American rule of law at the highest levels (to embolden an autocrat, in this case a delusional, brat-like one) helps "working people." In Bannon, we have an unusually complete personification of a desire to break American democracy, as if one were smashing a clock with a hammer in order to fix it. Bannon fuses a wounded egotism and a mythic nationalism, a reaction fired by a seething assumption that some apocalyptic, world-scale disaster could restore this small, individual blow-hard's lost dignity. The biggest defect of the film is that Morris didn't use his talent to imply or illustrate the perceived losses that motivate Bannon. Bannon obviously functions by mapping a personal or familial trauma onto a knight-vs.-dragon romance featuring "globalism" as the dragon (no explanation of any loss or disappointment of Bannon's is provided, but such a loss is a tacit theme of the whole). Morris could have done much more than assemble a film that remains a dramatic stage (featuring the set of a WWII airplane hangar that goes up in flames) for Bannon's ramblings, but to *analyze* a key psychopathy in current history. Because America, based largely on the luck of our geographical isolation from the full reach of other belligerents, came out of the disaster of World War II with three decades of prosperity, he maniacally dreams of a WWIII rather than having a coherent plan for making anything. None of Bannon's notorious scams come to light in the film; Morris overlooks the bizarre irony that Bannon earned considerable seed money for his current career by dealing (out of Hong Kong) illegal (according to the games' developers) video game accessories and cheats in the 2000s. His vague fantasies of remaking America by burning it down not only appeal to many wounded egos but create a thick smokescreen against realities--like his (and Trump's) scams. The machine that is broken seems to be Bannon, not America, but Morris failed to put together a vivid analysis of why Bannon doesn't run right, but merely puzzled at the spectacle of the bound, grinding gears. The stakes are higher than the film implied. That thing could blow up.