‘Weiner’ is painfully honest and appallingly funny

“Weiner” is a hugely entertaining documentary that is also very insightful about the state of politics today. Sure, it’s about the New York congressman whose fall from grace was so heavily covered that we may feel we already know too much about him. But remarkably this movie manages to continually surprise us thanks in large part to its unprecedented access not only to Anthony Weiner but also to his staff and, most revealingly, his wife, the always-behind-the-scenes-but-nevertheless-high-profile Huma Abedin.

Painfully honest and appallingly funny, “Weiner” very well may be the richest and most complex film of the year.

The movie follows Weiner’s attempted political comeback — the New York City mayoral race in 2013, two years after his resignation from Congress in the wake of a sexting scandal.

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Weiner and his wife had reasoned that the best way to move beyond the scandal was to run for another office and expunge that stench of disgrace with a winning campaign. After all, Weiner had always been good at winning elections (seven terms in Congress). And part of his plan to revive his image was to allow a film crew to document the campaign from the inside, very inside. Both decisions — to run for office to repair one’s reputation and to give independent filmmakers near total access to the inner workings of his campaign — may look like questionable strategies, in retrospect, but it’s good to remember that he was actually leading in the polls for much of the race. As Weiner himself would argue.

“The punchline is true about me. I did the dumb thing — but I did a lot of other things too,” he says.

He did do a lot of other things. The problem was he also did a lot of other dumb things, or rather, the same dumb thing again and again and again. When new naked photos of him suddenly surface in the midst of the race, it hits the campaign like a bombshell. And the rest of the movie takes place in crisis mode, politically and personally. I don’t know if it’s a testament to Weiner’s integrity that he allows the film crew to carry on recording as his world is imploding or if it’s just another sign that his ego is bigger than his common sense. Whatever the case may be, it makes for some incredibly juicy footage.

There are countless instances of awkward and yes, humiliating confrontations Weiner has with various staffers and the public, but the most excruciating interactions are between Weiner and his wife. A very close confidante of Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin is famous for shunning the spotlight, so it’s a bit startling to see her step outside her comfort zone to help her husband’s campaign. She’s become so much a woman of mystery that even just eavesdropping on her working the phones early in the campaign somehow seems revelatory.

But the real revelations come as the campaign collapses. Huma is as stoic as Andrew is animated, but the long-suffering looks she throws at him time after time as he tries to wriggle out from one crisis to another are absolutely withering and probably familiar to many husbands who’ve ever let down their wives.

At times, the documentary almost seems too private for us to be witnessing. Andrew may be the showboater, the peacock in the relationship, but ultimately Huma’s the intriguing one, the perfect embodiment of a “still waters run deep” personality type. The movie’s title may be “Weiner” but Huma steals the show.

Ultimately, what makes this documentary work so well is that it operates on so many different dramatic levels — the personal, the political, and the ever-evolving intersection of politics and the media, especially social media.