Butler's Cinema Scene

Steve Bannon

“THE BRINK” My rating: B (Now at the Screenland Tapcade)

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

Most liberals, it’s safe to say, would rather endure three hours of oral surgery than spend 90 minutes with Steve Bannon,  alt-right Sith lord and mastermind behind the Trump presidential campaign.

They ignore Bannon at their own peril.

For “The Brink” filmmaker Alison Klayman (“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”) spent nearly a year following the post-White House Bannon, eavesdropping as he continues his quest for economic nationalism. Bannon has expanded his ambitions beyond the U.S., becoming a force in the right-wing politics of several nations where he advocates the return of “old-school Christian democracy rooted in the European tradition.”

It’s worrisome.

“The Brink,” a title obviously chosen for its ominous implications, falls well short of the hatchet job liberals might desire.  For one thing, Bannon can be charmingly self-deprecating. He laughs at the scruffy, overweight image he often presents (“a gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk”) and is a quick-witted and compelling speaker (providing, of course, you appreciate his message).

Despite his reputation, Bannon is never caught doing or saying anything overtly racist.  He claims that economic nationalism binds all Americans together, and that it trumps all issues of race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. He blames America’s industrial elites for abandoning all civic conscience and chasing money by shipping jobs abroad. On that last point he sounds not unlike the Democratic Party’s neo-lefties.

He says  there was no glamor in working for the White House, claiming to have hated every moment of his tenure. Churches have a positive energy, he claims, while a Jersey strip club has another kind of energy.  “The West Wing has bad karma…because you’re doing evil stuff. I thought I was doing the Lord’s work.”

Do not regard that as a statement of regret. The tricky thing about Steve Bannon is the way his theoretical idealism falls apart in the real world application.

He may claim that a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian representatives was “treasonous” and should have been immediately reported to the FBI. Yet  he was the main instigator of  Trump’s clearly unconstitutional Muslim ban. He was behind the failed senatorial campaign of Alabama’s Roy Moore, a man with a history of child molestation.

Bannon doesn’t say much about his old boss, but observes that  “Trump taught me a great lesson — there is no bad media.”

Indeed, Bannon appears to have given Klayman unprecedented access. We see him at home in bedroom slippers, holding conversations on two phones at once, eating breakfast, chatting with his nephew and assistant. When caught in an embarrassing or adversarial moment, he jokes to the camera that it’s  certain to be part of the finished film.

(The one area where Bannon drew the line was in his meetings with deep-pocket contributors.  Klayman and her crew are ushered out of the room before those sessions; the sources of much of Bannon’s funding remain secret.)

Love him or hate him, Bannon is an entertainer. He has a playfully dark sense of humor.  Watching a rough cut of a TV ad campaign for a Republican candidate, he suggests some editing tweaks. “What would Leni Riefenstahl do?” he jokes, referring to Adolf Hitler’s favorite propagandist and filmmaker.

“The Brink” ends with the 2018 mid-term elections in which, despite Bannon’s Herculean efforts, the House went to the Democrats.  This may leave some watchers with a sense of triumph…or at least hope.

After watching Bannon in action, my advice is to not get complacent. He’s far from being done.

| Robert W. Butler