Venice Film Review: Steve Bannon in 'American Dharma'

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/american-dharma-review-steve-bannon-errol-morris-1202925715/

If you walked into “American Dharma,” Errol Morris’s documentary about Stephen K. Bannon, knowing nothing about Donald Trump’s former adviser (who he is, what he’s done, what he stands for), you’d probably find him to be a fascinating, compelling, and at times even charming figure. If that sounds like a swipe against the movie, it is.

This is one of those drill-bit solo interview films in which Morris, in theory, adopts a stance that’s adversarial and exploratory as he grills world-shaking power players like Robert S. McNamara (“The Fog of War”) or Donald Rumsfeld (“The Unknown Known”). In this case, though, Morris abandons his trademark Interrotron camera, the contraption that locked his previous subjects into a vise-like gaze meant to reveal their every brain flicker of ego and doubt. “American Dharma” was shot in what looks like a military airplane hangar, where the 64-year-old Bannon, wearing a modified Army jacket (remember when rebel kids in the ’70s sported those?), with graying stubble and a head of thick Irish hair that he brushes back with shaggy professorial élan, sits opposite Morris, who is sometimes on camera, and joins in a spirited dialogue with him.

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In “American Dharma,” Bannon’s analysis of what’s wrong with the money-sloshing corporate-bureaucratic-government elite machine that has screwed over average Americans overlaps, in a major way, with the critique of that same machine you’d get from Michael Moore or Bernie Sanders. Yet when it comes to what Bannon would do to fix the machine, he parts ways. He wants to blow the machine up. He thinks we’re ready for a “revolution.” And what, exactly, does that mean? We never learn, because Bannon is a man who thinks, and talks, in fearless abstractions. The elite, by my math, would certainly include him (a former investment banker who made his fortune through a fluke syndication deal in liberal Hollywood), but Bannon doesn’t want to mess with that contradiction. His comic-book fantasy of an uprising of angry valiant middle Americans is supposed to melt our brains enough to explain the contradiction away.

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In “American Dharma,” Errol Morris keeps trying to understand Steve Bannon, which is the job of a journalist-filmmaker, but we never see him stand up to Bannon’s most brazen lies, like Bannon’s assertion that the racism that came out into the open in Charlottesville represented a trivial sideshow element of Donald Trump’s appeal. We never hear Bannon talk about his white nationalism; that’s all buried. (He says that when he was running Breitbart, the comments section was “not for the faint of heart,” but he says it with a wink, as if he was above it.) His new status as a forceful consultant to the European far right gets scant attention. Morris “contradicts” Bannon with video clips, but too much of the time he’d rather sit around with him and watch old movies. Would The New Yorker’s David Remnick, if he’d gone ahead with his plan to conduct a live public interview with Bannon, have done a more aggressive job? We’ll never know. But what you see in “American Dharma” isn’t investigative filmmaking — it’s a toothless bromance.