American Dharma

American Dharma

To confront contentious figures (Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, the Abu Ghraib guards, Holocaust denier Fred A. Leuchter Jr., designer of execution devices), Errol Morris never goes at them head-on; he lets them speak for themselves and doesn’t overtly comment on their stories or justifications. In principle, it seems like a perfect match: the documentarian applying that approach to Steve Bannon, the filmmaker and right-wing ideologue who briefly became Donald Trump’s chief strategist and still carries the torch for him (and his cause) long after being shown the door at the White House.

Unfortunately, this might be the first time in Morris’ career that he has made a movie about someone who has seen his movies before sitting down with him Bannon even says one of his own failed filmmaking efforts was inspired by watching “The Fog of War” and knows what to expect. As a result, “American Dharma” is an empty exercise in talking to Bannon that is so gentle on its subject it’s almost fan service.

Bannon talks to Morris from inside a replica of an enormous Quonset hut; over hours of conversation he describes his history and political philosophy in detail. The belief that America needs to be saved from its more progressive and emotional impulses by adopting a hard-line ideology rooted in strength and self-sacrifice occurred to him when he saw a sports uniform with “Made in Vietnam” printed on it while visiting his daughter at West Point; if blowing up the entire system is what it takes to accomplish that and let people realize their “dharma” duty/fate/destiny so be it.

This would lead him from Harvard Business School through documentaries (many of which could fairly have been described as pure propaganda) into Breitbart News then eventually land him in the White House, where for a little while he was able to serve under Trump, whom he continues to commend for supposedly being a leader willing to defend a Judeo-Christian ethic perverted by globalization and multinational corporations. The narrative is divided into sections, each one concluded with a “classic” movie that Bannon an avowed film buff claims has helped shape his unique perspective.

Morris lured Bannon in by not adhering to his usual method of having his subject address the camera head-on while he sits just off-screen. Rather than presenting himself as a nonentity, invisible but for the questions he asks, Morris keeps himself in frame throughout the film, sitting across from Bannon at a table. This initially seems to promise a more confrontational style of interview, as if Morris has decided that only hardball will do when dealing with someone who so clearly knows how to manipulate the media into doing his work for him.

Yet Morris does not really interrogate Bannon. In fact, one of the most direct questions he asked came after the cameras had been turned off and when they were chatting privately: “Are you happy?” The closest he comes is acknowledging that he voted for Clinton over Trump an admission that genuinely seems to baffle Bannon, who cannot understand why anyone on his wavelength would ever do such a thing. As an interviewer, Morris can occasionally seem feeble; and his decision to visually present Bannon as a jovial doomsayer (the movie ends with him striding away from us toward some conflagration or other, Quonset hut in flames) is so flattering that I can imagine Bannon using it as his Christmas card next year.

The problem with Bannon is that 90 minutes of him are less like seeing a monster than like watching paint dry. In his other movies, Morris has often picked subjects who can change in front of our eyes because they have some capacity for self-reflection; here, Bannon never shifts gears. His crackpot theory of the body politic only he can save it from itself, blah blah blah may be calm-sounding and even persuasive on the surface (particularly if you’ve been sipping at the Breitbartian Kool-Aid), but it doesn’t go anywhere; the film quickly becomes a monotonous blur interrupted only when he says something especially odious, as when he dismisses the idea that his way of thinking helped lead to Charlottesville by claiming that the neo-Nazis who marched there were all just mainstream-media creations.

Not only is he boring; Bannon also turns out to be an astonishingly bad and uninformed cultural critic, misinterpreting films such as “12 O’Clock High,” “The Searchers” and “Chimes at Midnight” in ways that would get him laughed out of any halfway decent film theory class suggesting, for example, that Prince Hal’s betrayal of Falstaff in “Chimes” represented the natural order of things and was perfectly okay with Falstaff himself. (Movies aren’t his sole stumbling block; at one point he describes Greek tragedies as being ultimately “hopeful.”)

“American Dharma” is a strangely unaffecting and enervating work Trump fatigue made celluloid flesh all the more so because it comes from a filmmaker who has made great movies about pet cemeteries and naked mole rats. And if its sense of general ineffectuality weren’t enough, it follows hard upon “The Brink,” Alison Klayman’s infinitely sharper fly on the wall account of Bannon’s post White House efforts to export his nationalist message around the globe, which quietly and devastatingly revealed him to be a windbag whose all important idea amounts to little more than fascist bluster with a vacuum at its center.

That movie was essentially Bannon’s self-dug grave. “American Dharma,” on the other hand, may not quite cross the line into inadvertent hagiography; but I fear that it will be embraced most enthusiastically by those who follow him, or think like him.

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