It’s (Not) Handled
A Review of Weiner
As I watched Weiner, I couldn’t help but imagine how Scandal’s Olivia Pope would have saved the day. Pope always has a strategy. “It’s handled” is said before an incident is actually handled. Out-of-the-ordinary situations are taken care of in out-of-the-ordinary ways—her team will blackmail someone, or her assistant will hack into the FBI, or she’ll call in a favor with the president. Crisis management is glamorous and fascinating and cinematic.
This is not what you get when you watch Weiner. We all know nobody swooped in to save the day; Anthony Weiner is back in headlines because he has messed up yet again. This time he is under investigation for illicit text messages sent to a 15-year-old girl. But plot twist, the FBI has discovered emails potentially sent to Hillary Clinton’s private email server, sent by ex-wife and top Clinton aide, Huma Abedin. And these emails may not have been handed over in the initial investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. And there are five days until the election. This recent surge of news makes it clear that Weiner has become a punchline in DC: “We’re still talking about that guy during a presidential election?” said John Burton, the chairman of the California Democratic Party, according to the New York Times.
Weiner was supposed to be a comeback film. After accidentally tweeting a sexually explicit photo of himself, Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011. Two years later, he ran for New York City mayor, and was first in the polls until the second scandal broke. The scandal itself is flashy—a married politician sexting a 23-year-old woman, after a previous scandal nearly destroyed his career. But the way it’s handled is pretty lackluster. Weiner’s crisis management meeting is nothing more than an urgent staff meeting in his living room. Alone, he rehearses different ways to say “I’m sorry” to the press. His impassioned argument with Lawrence O’Donnell was filmed in an empty, quiet room. The climax of the documentary is a chase through the backways of a McDonald’s. In these moments—the awkward silences, stern glances, and crossed arms—Weiner simply states that this is real life, and these are real humans—it’s not Scandal.
Perhaps the best part of Weiner is that it makes us laugh. New Yorkers half-recognize Weiner on the street, and he claims to be a lookalike unsure why cameras are following him. Weiner’s assistant accidentally reveals Pineapple as the code name for Sydney Leathers, the woman he sexted. After Weiner confronts a man for calling him a scumbag, a man outside sweetly shrugs, “Why didn’t he just walk away? It was going nicely.” The McDonald’s chase scene could be straight out of a movie—it’s all so ridiculous. Anthony Weiner is a character, and even the documentary struggles to chip away at this facade and get him to really divulge. At one point, he even jokes to the crew, “What happened to being a fly on the wall?” Even though we follow him into some intimate moments, we never really get to know why he did any of this. Why did he risk his career and reputation for sexts?
The people around Weiner suffer with him. His bright-eyed and smiling communications director Barbara Morgan grows weary by the end, and his wife, Huma Abedin, goes from laughing and joking on the campaign trail to not even showing up on Election Day. Huma, in fact, is a focal point of this film. The fact that she is married to him is Weiner’s redeeming quality. She is a successful, graceful, intelligent woman, who is Huma Abedin first, Hillary Clinton’s “other daughter” second, and somewhere down the line Anthony Weiner’s wife. If she loves him, we probably should too? Huma is the one who brings in donors (her friends) at the start of his mayoral campaign, and she is the one who speaks at the press conference after the second scandal breaks. Her silences, her glares, her crossed arms speak the loudest.
Recently, Weiner has been referred to as Huma Abedin’s “estranged husband.” Any sort of political comeback is unthinkable—it’s clear that he has a sexting addiction, and his career is done. Weiner signed up to be a politician, and along with that comes an elevated set of expectations. Olivia Pope cannot fight the media army in real life, and though Weiner’s team tried, Weiner documents how it was not handled.