'American Dharma' closes a kind of trilogy in which director Errol Morris interviews former high ranking administration officials, officials with not great reputations owing to disasters they helped oversee. While in 'Fog of War' Robert MacNamara agonizes over his role in the Vietnam War, and in 'The Unknown Known' Donald Rumsfield seems genuinely perplexed that Iraq didn't work out, in 'American Dharama' Steve Bannon calmly explains that he was right all along.
Major criticisms of this film focus on hos well Bannon comes off, and a sense that Morris didn't push him as hard as those previous interview subjects. Both Morris and myself I think were caught a little off guard, by how charming Bannon can be, how reasonable he can sound. Bannon of course, a film lover (as is made evident throughout the picture, as he discusses keynote films for his world view), know how to act. He has placed himself firmly in a reasonable gear, as reasonable as a rabid, provaction prone, political apocolyptisist can sound, which is shockingly reasonable.
Like the 2016 election Bannon takes something that should have been a resounding lose for him, and turns it into a sort of narrow win. While Morris raises critiques a plenty to Bannon, the calm way he dismisses them serves him rather well. Something of a missed opertunity, but still a reveling portrait of how Bannon sees himself and would like to be seen. ***
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