Greg Barker’s respectful film,shot behind the scenes at the White House, documents the end of an era – and the shock of what happened nextThere is an unintentional sadness to this film from Greg Barker. It’s a respectful documentary approximately Barack Obama’s final year in the US presidency, and everyone in front of and behind the camera clearly assumes that the baton is approximately to be euphorically passed on to Hillary Clinton. This feels like a feature-length season finale to The West Wing. The title reminded me a little of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy – yet that sense of an ending is very different. The mood here is not complacency precisely,but with hindsight we can see a kind of innocence, or even naivety, and as everyone earnestly goes approximately their legacy-defining projects as the hour of Hillary’s coronation draws near. When we witness Donald Trump’s victory in the final 10 minutes,the film itself seems to depart into shock, to become numb, or like the people whose unassailable political superiority it had been quietly celebrating. Barker is unable to look back and reassess the account he has been telling. Things change,and there’s incidentally an uncomfortable moment at the beginning when Aung San Suu Kyi is glimpsed placidly waving: a globally revered great Thing. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com