‘Documentary Now!’ Captures the Crazy Cynicism of a Political Election
Documentary Now! kicks off a lively new season — its 51st, if you believe “host” Helen Mirren, and you shouldn’t — Wednesday night on IFC with a spot-on parody of a political documentary. It’s one I fear too many people won’t remember: The War Room, the look at the 1992 Bill Clinton-George Bush presidential campaign that altered many viewers’ ideas about how campaigns were conducted. It made media stars of two behind-the-scenes guys, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who were shown to be ruthless manipulators of public imagery and political messaging.
Documentary Now! calls its production The Bunker, and it stars Bill Hader as the Carville figure (he’s named Teddy Redbones) and Fred Armisen as the Stephanopoulos stand-in (the show calls him Alvin Panagoulious). Hader had, of course, perfected his Carville impersonation during his years on Saturday Night Live, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less funny here.
Loose-limbed and dressed in a garish striped polo shirt that exactly matches Carville’s, Hader’s Redbones is a drawling Southern huckster, prone to temper tantrums to cover up the exacting, sometimes ludicrous, demands he places upon his staff. Armison’s Panagoulious is, like Stephanopoulos, a mop-topped eager beaver, to whom Armisen adds another trait: entitled horndog.
When co-director/producers D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus made The War Room, it was a big deal — the movie equivalent of The Selling of the President, Joe McGinniss’s book about the 1968 election, and another huge phenomenon of its time that I doubt many people recall now. Anyway, The War Room introduced us to the concept of corrupting-the-process campaign consultants as image-makers, and in its comic, half-hour way, Documentary Now!’s The Bunker — written with a pitch-perfect ear for 1990s blather by comic John Mulaney — does a fine job of distilling this feature-film message quite succinctly. Or as Hader’s Teddy says, “We changed the way that election narratives are hijacked.”
Documentary Now! airs Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. on IFC.
