The Brink Gives Steve Bannon the Attention He Craves

Steve Bannon wants to be a star. The danger of making documentaries about him, as Alison Klayman and Errol Morris have both done in the past year, is that it plays into this desire. Morris’ American Dharma, organized around an interview with the former Trump adviser, has been controversial enough to apparently scare away U.S. distributors. The Brink, which is making its way to U.S. theaters just a few months after its Sundance premiere, proves that the mere subject of Bannon doesn’t necessarily make distributors balk. It’s a fairly conventional film whose approach never lets the audience doubt that the director is a progressive who opposes Bannon’s politics. 

Klayman and her producer Marie-Therese Guirgis have said they know Bannon’s rhetorical debate skills and tricks and thus didn’t want to do a sit-down interview with him. Klayman followed Bannon on the road for 13 months, working as the only film-crew member. Bannon probably trusted her because he thought he could use The Brink to get his message across, but he nevertheless seems to have watched his mouth in front of her camera — he doesn’t say anything about his politics that isn’t already on the record.

Bannon is a filmmaker himself, and he used to own the arthouse distributor Wellspring, where Guirgis worked in the early 2000s. As Klayman was shooting her film, Bannon was laboring to finish his documentary Trump @War. The Brink has been described as cinema vérité, but it doesn’t stick to a strict definition of the format. Klayman jumps into the film, although she doesn’t appear in the frame, to confront Bannon about his use of the word “deplorables” — if you drink each time Bannon says it, you’ll wind up pretty wasted — as a right-wing version of the identity politics he claims are destroying America. Even without Klayman’s interjection, the parallels between Bannon trying to organize his audience around pride in the “deplorables” label and minorities’ reclamation of slurs like “queer” are glaring.

There’s nothing new in The Brink to anyone who has followed American politics and the global rise of right-wing authoritarianism over the past few years. The media has played up Bannon’s self-identification with Darth Vader and statements like “darkness is good,” perhaps without realizing that mythologizing him as a guru with some sort of dark magical power is playing into his hands. The film never pushes home the contradiction of a wealthy Harvard-educated former investment banker who spends his time flying across the U.S. and Europe selling himself as the champion of the American working class. He presents himself as the scourge of the establishment, but he represents it as much as his Toronto debate partner David Frum, who used to write speeches for George W. Bush and now works as an editor for The Atlantic. 

The film could’ve done far more with the irony of Bannon “blathering about how it’s not racist to be racist” (as critic Vadim Rizov put it) to a sea of white faces at his speeches. Apart from a scene in which Bannon meets with representatives of far-right European parties, The Brink doesn’t much put him in a larger context. 

As critical as Klayman is of Bannon, she still feeds into his cult of personality by focusing on him as a person instead of exploring the appeal of the ideology he represents. Right-wing authoritarianism existed long before Trump entered politics, and its current rise can’t be explained just by following one man around.

The Brink

NR, 91 minutes

Opening Friday, April 12, at the Belcourt