Steve Bannon gets a pass in Morris’ tame portrait
Every time the legendary filmmaker Errol Morris cuts to a clip from a classic movie such as “The Bridge on the River Kwai” or “The Searchers” in his new documentary on right-wing provocateur Steve Bannon, we celebrate the moment.
The reasons are twofold. First, it’s always a treat to see snippets of great cinema. Second, every second when
Gregory Peck or John Wayne commands the screen provides relief from Bannon’s increasingly boring, repetitive dogma and his self-aggrandizing demeanor.
Given “American Dharma” is from the man who delivered powerful, hard-hitting docs about history influencers such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara, this is a surprisingly and disappointingly tame film, in which Morris is almost deferential to Bannon.
Much of “American Dharma” consists of Morris interviewing Bannon in a Quonset hut that looks like a replica of a set from one of Bannon’s all-time favorite movies, “Twelve O’Clock High.”
Bannon explains he’s been obsessed with this film ever since he first caught it when he was at Harvard Business School. “[We see] two types of leadership — one being the touchy-feely guy, the other being Gregory Peck, who is clearly a hard-ass, but he’s not a hard-ass,” says Bannon. “He understands his dharma. He understands what he has to do. …
“Dharma is the combination of duty, fate and destiny. For to fulfill my dharma, I have to fulfill my duty.”
In the immortal words of Sgt. Hulka in “Stripes”: Lighten up, Francis.
Bannon has a certain rough-hewn charm; he flatters his questioner by telling him seeing Morris’ “The Fog of War” at the Telluride festival was his own inspiration for getting into filmmaking.
Perhaps that’s why Morris offers relatively little in the way of challenging follow-up questions when Bannon bloviates ad nauseam e.g., “If you gave me the choice between being governed by the first 100 people that show up in red ball caps at a Trump rally, vs. the first 100 guys that walk into [the] Davos [world economic forum] with their tickets, I’ll take the working-class people.” When Morris does challenge Bannon, telling him he felt the travel ban on Muslims was “inherently racist,” we see Bannon nodding, but we don’t hear a response. It’s one of far too many underwhelming exchanges.
It’s too bad Morris didn’t conclude the film by showing a clip from another great movie: “The Candidate,” in which a superficial contender scores an upset victory and becomes a U.S. senator. In the final scene, Robert Redford’s Bill McKay says to his campaign operative: “What do we do now?”
The answer never comes, just as Bannon never fully addresses his feelings about the state of the country and the world since his man was given the keys to the Oval Office.