The Brink

A left-leaning film made by a left-leaning filmmaker for a left-leaning audience, which doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know Taking as its subject Steve Bannon, the so-called "Kingmaker" behind Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, Alison Klayman's documentary The Brink attempts to portray and engage with the controversial alt-right figure without crossing the line into hagiography. Seeing himself as spearheading a global alt-right populist movement (called The Movement), Bannon is a heroic truth-teller to some, a personification of a hateful and racist ideology to others, in whose worldview the only good American is a white Christian heterosexual American. And whilst The Brink is perfectly adequate as a documentary, it's limited by its identity as a left-leaning film made by a left-leaning filmmaker for a left-leaning audience. Very few people on the right will see it, and those that do will find nothing therein to change their minds about him. The film begins in August 2017, a few weeks after Bannon was fired from the White House in the wake of the Unite the Right rally, and Klayman traces his disastrous endorsement of Roy Moore, the publication of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, the subsequent break with Trump due to comments in the book, his time in Europe, and his campaigning during the 2018 midterms. She focuses on his European activities, where his aim is to unify and centralise the various right-wing populist groups. Bannon is at pains throughout the film to stress that neither he nor Trump are racists. In this vein, at a fundraiser early in the film, Bannon states that Trump doesn't care about skin colour, religion, or sexuality, he "cares only that you're a citizen of the United States of America". Seeing the film two days after Trump told three non-Caucasian American-born senators and one non-Caucasian naturalised American senator to "go back where you came from", these words had some considerable unintended irony. Klayman shoots the film in a cinéma vérité fly-on-the-wall style, letting events play out without really commenting on them (although she does question Bannon directly a couple of times), allowing some of Bannon's more outrageous comments to speak for themselves. For example, at a rally in Hungary, he states that The Movement will be built on "old school Christian democracy rooted in the European tradition" (so plenty of room for Muslims); he asserts that "divine providence is about human action" (unaware of the oxymoron); and in perhaps his most perplexing claim, he refers to China, Iran, and Turkey as the "new Axis". In terms of challenging Bannon, Klayman's editing is very interesting. For example, she intercuts news reports on Cesar Sayoc and the Tree of Life shooting with Bannon arguing that he's not racist. Later, she intercuts scenes of migrants being attacked in Germany with Bannon's five-star hotel meetings with right-wing politicians. In another scene, when he insists that he would never take any non-American money, she cuts to him meeting Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. Most powerfully, after the disastrous 2018 midterms, over scenes of Bannon trying to figure out what went wrong, Klayman plays an audio montage of newly-elected Democrat women condemning the kind of hatred upon which he thrives. For all that, however, the film has significant flaws. Most egregiously, Klayman assumes her audience is in total agreement with her – that Bannon is a dangerous purveyor of hatred and prejudice. Because of this, the documentary remains all surface; she doesn't offer a deep dive into his psychology because why would she when the audience already thinks like her? In this sense, it's hard to know what anyone will glean from the film; the very few on the right who see it, will read it as more evidence of a left-leaning elitist media determined to crush the right; those on the left will simply have their opinions reaffirmed. With this in mind, it's hard to pinpoint what Klayman accomplishes with the film – it doesn't tell us anything about Bannon we didn't already know and it doesn't reveal much about his thought processes or private ideology. In the same sense, it isn't going to change anyone's way of thinking. So what was the point? Why give such a hateful and dangerous individual so much attention when you don't have anything in mind other than having your audience agree with you? At best, the film suggests that he's a good example of the banality of evil – Klayman is trying to demystify him, painting him as a slick used car salesman, successfully selling cars he knows are defective. But really, did he actually need demystifying? The Brink is a perfectly watchable film, but so too is it perfectly forgettable, which, given the subject and the extraordinary access, is hugely disappointing. Indeed, as it ended, the only thought I had in my head was "Bannon would have loved that". Which is not exactly a good thing.