DN: FILM The Brink
“I’m gonna get so beat up in this film,” Steve Bannon predicts, laughing, at one point in THE BRINK, Alison Klayman’s fascinating, discomfiting doc. And the blows do come; while Bannon plays the role of the self-deprecating sport who’s just trying to do the Lord’s work, the dismaying things he’s responsible for (white supremacy, anti-Semitism, virulent nationalism, the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.), are readily apparent. But there’s no damage done—he’s a rascal copping to what a bad boy he is, him knowing that the worse he comes off to the wrong people, the better he is in the eyes of the far right ones.
Acutely engaged in his own mythology, Bannon strives here to put himself across as a workaday genius, a nose-to-the-grindstone true believer laboring on behalf of a host of noble causes—Trumpism, Republicanism, worldwide anti-immigrant nationalism—vilified by his opponents. On-brand Bannon is a shaggy, red-nosed, multiple-shirt-wearing dark ops master who revels in calling attention to his signature moves, be they sartorial or political. He’s fond of his glory days, be they 40 years ago (“That’s pretty bad-ass,” he says of his own college-class-president campaign slogan) or the ones he predicts for tomorrow (he’s doing what he can to help craft a unified European movement dedicated to his favorite themes, and promises great success).
Klayman puts her thumb on the filmmaking scale from time to time—like showing Bannon’s go-to photo-op line, where he and another man stand on either side of a woman, setting him up to say “A rose between two thorns” so often that he inevitably comes across as an insincere tool—but mostly she lets the camera roll. Here’s Bannon in a lot of hotel rooms, in a lot of cars, in a lot of planes. Here he is alone again in another big room, his face illuminated by the glow of his cellphone. Often, when he’s in company, it’s either at dinners and presentations that feel like they just missed making their way into a parody, or with a handful of other company me who are frequently on the wrong end of his invective. (No shock Bannon’s got a foul mouth when he’s mad; he’s mad a good bit.) It’s all kind of sad so far as a character study goes, but you can’t look away: You’re riveted by Bannon’s insatiable drive to win. Even as the film progresses through Bannon’s support of child-molesting-accused people Roy Moore and onto the Republican drubbing in the 2018 midterms, he remains unbowed, apparently shifting his focus to other targets, other prey.