‘Hillary’ is an Honest Portrait of Hillary Clinton’s Unsung Strengths and Greatest Failures

Tackling Hulu’s Hillary feels like a herculean task in and of itself. The four-part docuseries, which just made its debut at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, focuses on the life of one of history’s most polarizing figures. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been adored and reviled in her time, and your own experience watching Hillary will be largely shaped by the baggage you bring into it. But director Nanette Burstein has done something rather transcendent with the project. She’s managed to turn a biographic film into both an epic about American culture and an intimate portrait of a complicated woman burdened by her biggest blindspot: an almost self-righteous hubris.

Hillary is a lot, and we shouldn’t want it any other way.

Hulu’s Hillary was initially conceived as a campaign doc. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign granted director Nanette Burstein access to behind-the-scenes conversations on the trail with the hope that she was going to make a film about the rise of the first woman president. When Clinton eventually lost to Donald Trump, Burstein looked at the over 1,700 hours of footage she had and decided she had a bigger story to tell. As Clinton told reporters on the ground at Winter 2020 TCA, “Nanette…came back and said, ‘Look, this is a bigger story.  It needs to be told. It’s part of the arc of women’s history, advancement, choices that are made.'”

Indeed, Hillary isn’t just a portrait of a public figure, but a meditation on the push and pull of the women’s movement in America. We learn how Clinton was forged in this crucible of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, and how her husband’s gubernatorial loss in 1980s Arkansas forced her to drop her radical trappings to embrace the softer image of a political wife. This shift may have helped her husband’s career, but later it would prove to be a major weakness. Although her peers knew her as one of the most progressive forces in Democratic politics for decades, millennial voters saw her as staid, centrist, and part of the establishment.

Much of Hillary is devoted to the tragic ironies of Clinton’s life. She is considered cold, calculating, and cruel by many, while those who know her consider her to be warm, witty, and, by her own admission, putting the needs of others ahead of her own personal ambitions. Her Methodist upbringing inspires her to work for the public good, but it also imbues her with a brutal honesty that voters simply don’t want to hear. There’s a darkly comic moment where a young voter asks Clinton to vow to ban fracking, like Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, and Clinton bluntly tells her she won’t because legally a President doesn’t have the right to do that under the Constitution. It might be the morally right thing to say, but it is the politically wrong thing all the way.

Watching Hillary, I was most struck by how charming Clinton came across. Unlike the robotically stoic figure we know from the soundbites and stump speeches, Clinton is depicted as a candid breath of fresh air. We see her ease with her campaign staffers, her sharp sense of humor, and her total self-deprecation. Throughout the series, Clinton fesses up to her own failings. She was never a great candidate for President, she maybe shouldn’t have been so gullible in her marriage, and she never quite knew how to defeat her greatest rival, Trump. This is “Hillary Clinton: Unplugged” and with no fucks to give, as evidenced by the brusque soundbite of her slamming Bernie Sanders in the doc that’s already making headlines.

Still, Clinton’s total transparency reveals truths about her that perhaps she herself can’t see. As clever as Clinton is, she also displays — for the first time in Hillary — an aura of naiveté. When talking about the Whitewater scandal, she expresses true incredulity for the rabid manner in which the press has dogged her family. That disbelief follows conversations about almost all the scandals in her life. As one outsider points out, Clinton’s unwavering sense in her own self-righteousness creates a sort of blindness to the possibility that she could be in the wrong.

Hillary gives viewers the chance to go beyond soundbites and stereotypes, if they dare. Clinton and her contemporaries — including Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, daughter Chelsea Clinton, and key members of her staff — give their frank opinions on key moments in her life. However the super-sized documentary’s biggest revelation is the depth of Clinton’s blindspot about herself. Her unwavering pride in her own correctness is the source of her undoing. She can’t seem to see herself as the pariah others do, or even understand why her actions could be misconstrued. As her own campaign manager, Robby Mook, points out, her biggest strength is her biggest weakness. While he was referring to her wonkishness, it’s hard to walk away from Hillary and not see Clinton’s own self-belief as part of her ultimate undoing. It never occurred to her that other people couldn’t see what was obvious to her.

Hillary premieres on Hulu on March 6, 2020.