Fau­ci

This for­mal­ly unam­bi­tious talk­ing heads doc­u­men­tary intro­duces us to celebri­ty physi­cian and immu­nol­o­gist Antho­ny Fau­ci as he pre­pares for just anoth­er day at the office. This involves stand­ing at the van­guard in the bat­tle against Covid-19, bat­ting away troll mes­sages from the Dark Web, but main­ly work­ing as a diplo­mat between polit­i­cal fac­tions, some of whom – for rea­sons that range from straight-up igno­rance to extreme gulli­bil­i­ty – believe that the good doctor’s work is some­how imping­ing on their per­son­al freedoms.

As men­tioned in the film, pan­demics and pol­i­tics do not mix, where sit­u­a­tions such as Covid give fuel to craven politi­cians to take up point­ed­ly antag­o­nist caus­es and ral­ly all the oth­er hate-mon­ger­ing key­board war­riors with a view to accru­ing polit­i­cal dona­tions, or even a term in office. The major­i­ty of Fauci’s work, the doc­u­men­tary sug­gests, is less about the day-to-day lab work and find­ing a cure, and more about artic­u­lat­ing a mes­sage and pre­sent­ing him­self as some­one that peo­ple would have a hard time disbelieving.

As with almost all record­ed images fea­tur­ing ex-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, the short seg­ments fea­tured in this film are almost gag-induc­ing in their abject idio­cy. As most peo­ple are already aware, Fauci’s big fight wasn’t with Covid, it was with a com­man­der in chief who was chill­ing­ly open to offer­ing folksy med­ical advice based on the insane wit­ter­ings of my friend’s cousin’s brother’s bar­man. And of course, the right-wing media are always ready with their tar and feath­ers, out to ampli­fy some eso­teric cause that sticks one against The Establishment.

What’s most inter­est­ing here is how the film used Fau­ci to thread the nee­dle between the AIDS epi­dem­ic in the 1980s and the pan­dem­ic hap­pen­ing now. Fau­ci was also one of the lead­ing sci­en­tists lead­ing the charge against AIDS, and he came up against a sim­i­lar sort of resis­tance. Yet then, he wasn’t oper­at­ing from the moral and intel­lec­tu­al high ground as he is now: he failed to reach out to gay com­mu­ni­ties and activist caus­es and work with them.

As with now, he became the tar­get of hatred because he was the one plac­ing him­self on the fir­ing line, but the film does not shy away from the fact that he made mis­takes. It does, how­ev­er, make the con­vinc­ing case that he learned from them. It’s a hor­ror film in many ways, show­ing mat­ters of objec­tive med­ical con­cern tak­en advan­tage of by car­ni­val bark­ing yo-yos who are more intent on show­ing Fau­ci to be wrong than them­selves to be right. Bono turns up at the end to praise his work in suc­cess­ful­ly lob­by­ing George W Bush to send aid and med­i­cine to sub-Saha­ran Africa.