What is the point of Hillary? Offering viewers neither the election-night schadenfreude of HBO’s The Final Year nor the dogged specificity of Hillary Clinton’s own memoirs, Nanette Burstein’s four-part Hulu documentary skims along the surface of its subject like a hydroplane, occasionally putting down a fishing line but rarely getting a nibble. What Burstein has assembled is something akin to an idiot’s guide — a CliffsNotes Clinton certain to bore friends and enemies alike. Hillary is for Hillary, as decades of experience have taught us. Hillary is for … it’s difficult to say.
Like many a documentary before it, Burstein’s film combines historical footage with present-day commentary from its central figure and various others. Among those who sit for the camera are members of the 2016 campaign staff, Yale Law School classmates, friendly journalists, and, of course, Bill Clinton, who seems fond enough of his wife but is rarely seen in a room with her. As Hillary and Burstein reconstruct 72 years of Clintoniana in a series of amicable one-on-ones, the film aids the viewer’s memory with a string of flashbacks: Hillary as Goldwater girl, politician’s wife, junior senator, and secretary of state. Though these interludes are not without their charms, their cumulative effect is soporific. For every genuine human moment (such as Hillary’s threat to her Republican father that she will “grow up and marry a Democrat”), there are 10 rehashings of old scandals, grudges, and failures of Republicans to believe the Clinton narrative du jour.
To the extent that a documentary’s purpose is to get to the core of its subject, Burstein has chosen perhaps the most difficult assignment in contemporary politics. As people long ago concluded, the former secretary of state and first lady is a locked box — a message written in a code we can’t crack. One consequence of this fact is that even Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff tend to fill their Hillary interviews with shallow superlatives: Senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan calls the candidate “one of the most admired and one of the most vilified women in American history,” and an unidentified aide opines blandly that Clinton is “the most recognizable female public figure.”
That such generalities do nothing to further the audience’s understanding is obvious. What is less clear is why Burstein felt the need to include them. Had the director approached her work with slightly less partisan flair, she might have combed the archives for more quotes of the sort provided in the film’s quirkiest moment, during which a 1990s newscast declares Hillary to be “an ambitious yuppie from hell.”
Instead, and to its great detriment, Hillary seems content to be a four-hour apologia — an inauthentic defense of its subject’s authenticity that returns to the theme with wearying regularity. “I just couldn’t be anything other than what I was,” Clinton says of her high-school years. “I am who I am,” she insists in a 1992 flashback. So pervasive is Hillary’s I-gotta-be-me posturing, in fact, that it is left to the press to remind viewers that “what you see” is actually not “what you get,” despite Clinton nearly shouting that claim in the documentary’s opening minutes. Assessing Hillary’s loss to Obama in 2008, Peter Baker of the New York Times merely stated what everyone knew when he remarked that Obama “came across as authentic to a lot of Democrats.” The contrast with Clinton is all the more powerful for being unstated.
Though Burstein does what she can to show viewers the “real” Hillary, none of it convinces — not Clinton’s cartoonish shrieks of frustration in the film’s first interview, not the obnoxious girl-power anthem that plays over the opening credits, and certainly not the silly director’s trick of rolling the cameras a few seconds before Hillary is officially “ready.” (Has Clinton, in her life, ever assumed that a camera pointed at her was not on?) Indeed, the only sincere moment in the entire tedious production is a sequence in the second episode during which Hillary spitballs with her advisers about how to spin the results of the Iowa caucuses. Here is Clinton at her best: strategic, amoral, conniving, and briefly fascinating. Hillary the politician was an abject failure, as most viewers will concede. Hillary the campaign consultant might have done incredible things.
Like many a victim before her, Clinton is a person to whom things keep happening. Thus, the 2016 election unfolded as it did because “emails blew it all up” or because “classified information … ended up on [a] server,” to quote the tellingly worded sound bites of team Hillary. Without question, the email story reinforced existing narratives about Clinton’s untrustworthiness. Yet it’s hard to believe in the chances of any candidate who greets small-business owners with the claim that she just did “a big thing on small business.” Or who affected for years a ridiculous corn-pone accent when addressing Arkansas crowds. In Hillary’s assessment, her central weakness as a candidate was her vast knowledge of policy specifics and her inability, like George Washington, to tell a lie. (“I think you should level with people, … and that makes me a less-than-ideal politician,” she confides to Burstein.) The truth, however, may be closer to something the candidate says to Kate McKinnon while rehearsing a Saturday Night Live sketch: “You do me better than I do me.” Friends, there’s your election.
If, as seems fair to say, the Clinton who emerges in Hillary is more disappointed than embittered by her losses, viewers can be forgiven for wondering whether her face suggests otherwise in moments of privacy. Of course, we’ll never know — a Hulu documentary certainly can’t tell us — and so the woman beneath the focus-grouping and triangulation remains as obscure as ever: a figure of no great significance who believed more than anything in her own electoral destiny and who must now exit the scene. She will be little missed. To paraphrase the American avant-garde composer John Cage, Hillary had nothing to say, and she has said it.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
