It would be reasonable to assume that Pete Buttigieg, the MIA Transportation Secretary, would find friendly ground with the liberals. Politico but apparently his incredibly insular boring personality is so off-putting that even that periodical is unable to display much enthusiasm about the soon to be released “Mayor Pete” documentary. You don’t even need to read very far to find the harsh assessment of reviewer Ruby Cramer since it is shouted out in the title of Monday’s review, “‘He’s Comin’ Across Like the F—ing Tin Man Up There’.”
Jesse Moss (director and producer) found the subject to be quite elusive.
Now a feature film by Moss, director of the 2020 film “Boys State,” aims to fill the lingering curiosity gap about a candidate who has shaped his own unexpected political identity, first in South Bend, Ind., and now in Washington. Moss realized that it could be difficult to peel back all the layers.
He does not, by his own admission, have the “gregarious charisma” of Bill Clinton. It is evident that there is always activity going on, and not just in front of the screen but inside his head. At points, Moss says, he felt confounded by his own subject, turning to Chasten to bring Buttigieg emotionally within arm’s length.
“I was very stymied by that,” Moss told me ahead of the film’s release this Friday. “There were moments where I threw up my hands in frustration and despair.”
And that’s the underside of Moss’s premise, the dilemma in his film on constant display: It’s not exactly that Buttigieg is “bullshitting” us, as Chasten says in the first scene, or even that what you see is not, in fact, what you get. It’s the feeling of an inaccessible interior — of watching a person who is still becoming comfortable with himself and doing so on the biggest stage imaginable. The real drama that unfolds on screen is not about the ups and downs of a campaign, or even Buttigieg’s political prospects, though he states plainly in the film’s final scene that he could run again: “Time is on my side.” What you see instead is more basic: a story about personal identity in politics — a man, then 37, a presidential candidate, a breakout star, now the most prominent member of President Biden’s cabinet, who at every turn was unsure of how, or exactly how much, to share himself with the world. He was a believer in less is better. He always resisted the advice of his husband and campaign team.
It is difficult to sympathize with Moss’ attempt to portray a boring individual in a way that may be entertaining for viewers. Moss intentionally whitewashed an incident from Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.
The film is missing some important details. Moss documents Buttigieg’s struggle with the police shooting of Eric Logan, a Black man in South Bend, but the film leaves out the tensions over race and inclusion that divided his own campaign staff. (Rather, Moss presents the operation as a small, home-grown family, where aides are expected to “be really, really kind,” as campaign manager Mike Schmuhl tells staff early in the film.)
And if the documentary does not convince you that Buttigieg is a self-controlling robot, then this experience of the reviewer revealing the first time she encountered the future helpless bystander of the current supply chain crises will probably change your mind.
Buttigieg met me for the first time at Sheraton Phoenix, January 2017.His tenure as mayor of South Bend was not over. This made him a fresh entry into the race for the Democratic National Committee chair, which would be his debut on the national scene. As an aide led me up to his suite, she told me he was “the next John F. Kennedy.”
It was a DNC Candidat Forum, a simple and unglamorous affair. Inside the room, I asked Buttigieg about how he wanted to lead the party, and he quickly steered us into a conversation about what it means to lead a city with “values” — specifically, he said, the values of trash pickup services.
“The trash collection values” “The values of trash pickup?” I replied.
“Yeah. It’s connected to the meaning of life, in the sense that whatever the meaning life is —”
“Trash pick up?”
“Yeah,” he said, “because what’s the meaning of life for you?”
I struggled to speak.
“Whatever it is, whether it’s your professional growth, or faith and family, or you’re building a business, you will not be able to meet that life of your choosing if there’s not clean, safe drinking water for you, or a road to get you where you’re going — or if the trash isn’t getting picked up.”
Somehow it is hard to think of the original John F. Kennedy carrying on such an absurd conversation that sounds like campaign talking points rhetoric as regurgitated by a computer programmed to imitate a concerned sentient being.
You can avoid feeling deep sadness and regret from a time that was utterly wasted by putting “Tin Man”, aka “Mayor Pete”, on your Must-Miss list.
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