With a title and running time slightly longer than Donald Trump’s White House stint, Peter Kunhardt’s Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is an endlessly inquisitive and immaculately composed presidential portrait in pursuit of a more perfect balance – between man and moment.
The three-part documentary series clocks at almost five hours, and for good reason. It resides between the lines of a great orator – viewing the black-and-white legacy of the US' first African-American president through the prism of his colourful relationship with racial identity. Each part adopts the comprehensive density of a critical essay. The first charts young Barack Obama’s multi-ethnic roots and his restless rise into the US Senate. The second delves into his 2008 presidential campaign: his close Democratic Nominee race against Hillary Clinton, and his general election victory against Republican candidate John McCain. The third shakes off the honeymoon haze, and takes stock of his eight-year presidency, pivoting on his efforts to navigate the bridge between expectations and reality. But that is putting it mildly.
Obama truly understands the implications of what it means to be an agent of change in a deeply divisive world. The series gets that the symbol is the story, irrespective of who decides to write it. The panoramic gaze – the intellectual range of talking-head commentators (professors, historians, journalists, classmates, and colleagues), the archival footage, the beats of a national narrative, interviews with everyone but the man himself – ensures that Obama does not always come out looking clean. It has no qualms scrutinizing his cultural authenticity as a Black leader, his political idealism, and his defiant diplomacy in the face of racial inequity. The sense of where he comes from feels inextricably linked to who he chooses to be.
History is central to the personality of the person who makes it, and Kunhardt’s filmmaking joins the dots like no other biographical picture in recent memory. Every move of Obama’s is placed in context of an America at large, and vice-versa.
The storytelling imitates Obama’s headspace and analyses it at once. For instance, we see a young “Barry” piecing together the influence of an absent Kenyan father – he writes a memoir at 30, and finds his calling by reflecting on the man he never knew. There is little mention of his white Kansas-born mother till she dies, when Obama actually realises – as does the series – that his search for his father overlooked how fundamentally crucial she was in shaping him. His journey takes a brief and conscious pause, acknowledging that his penchant for public service may have come from her after all.
Later on, too, this headspace filters into the language of the docuseries. His critics – namely the more radical Black voices like activist-professor Cornel West, retired Rev Jeremiah Wright, and veteran politicians John Lewis and Bobby Rush – speculate on the nuances of his calculative image. And his loyalists turn this still-water headspace into an artform – featuring the perceptive Key & Peele skit centered on a fictional Obama and his “anger translator” Luther. In fact, the distance between what Obama needs to say and what he actually says goes a long way in rationalising the extensive reading of his character.
Speaking of character, Obama deliberately plays out like the mythical tale of a Chosen One who refuses to be defined by his roots – until he sees the light. At a cinematic level, it is like watching a superhero resist the burden of his identity till the brutal world leaves him with little choice. The first two episodes are detailed but crowd-pleasing; the only way, even through the downs, is up. But the final episode is tonally different, presenting an Obama torn between an America he wants to appease and the one he must heal. The rousing rhetoric makes way for a complicated conflict. You can sense an accumulation of feeling in him. At some point, the person and the politician merge. The events of racial profiling and violence – the shooting of a black teenager by a neighbourhood watchdog, the controversial arrest of a Cambridge professor for “breaking into” his own house – make it more and more difficult for the president to straddle a middle ground. His voice gets a little edgier every time a reporter asks for comment, and he runs out of ways to be eloquent – and merciful – about America’s White Supremacy problem.
The dam finally breaks after a church shooting, which lays the ground for Obama’s “return." There is a tangible shift of perspective. He seems to embrace his biological identity (African-American) over his political one (American), and the episode does a fine job of conveying Obama’s almost-meditative surrender to the moment. It is like seeing the ‘outsider’ – he of no slave heritage and unique privilege – belatedly being adopted by the insider angst. And yet, there is no meltdown or definitive turning of tide. It slowly dawns upon the viewer that his Rome was never about being built; it is about being dismantled.
This coming-of-age arc understands the inherent drama of the Barack Obama speech. His booming monologues – notably his I-have-a-dream-evoking keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, his victory speech at Grant Park, and a heartfelt pre-election note that refuses to disown his connections with an overzealous pastor – become real-life versions of an action set-piece. The buildup is exquisitely paced, and the pay-off is something no fictional biopic can replicate. The cutaways, to random faces in the crowd, are both tragic and thrilling in their recognition of the fact that Obama winning is bigger than any message he would go on to compile.
Most of all, the impossibly fair construction of this docuseries suggests that sometimes the symbol – of impeccable conduct, empathy, and elegance – has every right to be the story. It suggests that being a racial minority today can be about behaving as much as reacting, about dignity as much as disillusionment. Obama – both series and subject – eventually reveals that reform is not a policy but a person. That pioneering is a 9-to-5 process. And that change, too, is just as human as the people who set out to execute it.
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is streaming in India on Disney+ Hotstar Premium.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/hbo-docuseries-on-barack-obama-is-an-assiduously-constructed-study-on-former-us-presidents-political-and-biological-identities-9867701.html
