[VULTURE] "Why have you let me film this?" filmmaker Josh Kriegman asks his subject, disgraced congressman Anthony Carlos DangerWeiner
...aka
Hot Dog Tony, the remarkably offensive sex maniac six-term New York congressman who resigned in 2011, then decided everybody had forgotten by 2013, when he decided to run for mayor of New York City...
, as the cameras roll on him at home with his wife, top Hillary Clinton
... sometimes described as
For a good time at 3 a.m. call Hillaryand at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Tallyrand...
aide Huma Abedin, the morning after Weiner lost the 2013 New York City Democratic mayoral primary with just 4.9 percent of the vote. It's an excellent question, because the mere fact that the Sundance documentary Weiner exists at all is enough to make your head spin.
Kriegman and his co-director, Elyse Steinberg, started out making what they thought would be the ultimate comeback story: the politician known best for having tweeted pictures of his junk, now making a surprisingly plausible bid for mayor. (The film, which comes out in theaters May 20 and will then go to Showtime, does a great job of showing why people responded to Weiner's passion, and how at one point it looked like he would win.) What they couldn't have anticipated was that a second sexting scandal would break out during the campaign, and they would be in the room to capture the meltdown. Kriegman was once Weiner's chief of staff, which explains how these first-time directors got such insane access at the beginning, and their motives seem noble: to show what it's like to be actual people trying to do public service while being the butt of jokes in a 24-hour news cycle. Why Weiner let them stick around as the ship went down is between him and his psychologist. Whatever the case, it's an amazing gift to us.
Ironically, the coverage of this movie has been as much of a political snow job as the events it portrayed. Prior to its premiere at Sundance this week, speculation ran rampant among media outlets that hadn't seen it that its footage of Abedin would damage Clinton's presidential bid. (It won't.) Kriegman and Steinberg also have repeatedly had to refute claims that they trimmed out parts where the Clinton camp supposedly pressures Abedin to leave her husband. (They didn't -- the camp or the directors.) What's onscreen is actually far more interesting than the speculation: a baffling and humanizing look at a man without impulse control, driven into public life, and public humiliation, by hubris and narcissism, and his endlessly fascinating marriage to a woman who, against all logic, puts up with his shit.