Steve Bannon gets the documentary treatment in… | Little White Lies

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Steve Ban­non gets the doc­u­men­tary treat­ment in The Brink trailer

12 Mar 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

Older man with greying hair wearing a dark suit and tie, looking pensive.
Older man with greying hair wearing a dark suit and tie, looking pensive.
The noto­ri­ous Trump advi­sor is the sub­ject of Ali­son Klayman’s latest.

Film­mak­ers find a spe­cial fas­ci­na­tion in Steve Ban­non, the scar­let-faced neo­fas­cist who spear­head­ed far-right web site Bre­it­bart News and cleared the Trump campaign’s path to the White House. He was the focus of Errol Mor­ris’ lat­est fea­ture Amer­i­can Dhar­ma, and now, anoth­er doc­u­men­tary trains its lens on the polit­i­cal agent.

Ali­son Klay­man, direc­tor of Ai Wei­wei: Nev­er Sor­ry, select­ed a more con­temptible and yet equal­ly un-remorse­ful sub­ject for her film The Brink – the trail­er for which is now online. Nev­er being sor­ry is Steve Bannon’s whole schtick.

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The trail­er fol­lows him as he ris­es through the ranks of the Trump team, though he finds that suc­cess in that are­na only brings fur­ther, bang-your-head-against-the-wall frus­tra­tion. He then expands his reach by link­ing up with glob­al lead­ers inclined to sym­pa­thize with his anti-immi­grant and anti-refugee sen­ti­ments flown under the ban­ner of nation­al­ism. (Oh, look, it’s Nigel Farage!)

Any efforts to coax a glim­mer of human­i­ty out from his crass­ly oppor­tunis­tic exte­ri­or has been in vain. When Klay­man grills him, ​“Are you now con­sult­ing for the Nation­al Ral­ly Par­ty?” his only response comes, ​“And your point?”

Amer­i­can pol­i­tics is a nasty busi­ness, so per­haps it’s only fit­ting that its new avatar would be a man like Steve Ban­non. As the trail­er shows, he’s still get­ting the last laugh.

The Brink comes to the­aters in the US on 29 March.

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