Alister Barry/NZ/2008; R4
NZ$39.95 | Reviewed by David Lenny Kempkers

WHEN FILMMAKERS convert non-fiction books into documentaries, they tend to do so to achieve one or more of the following goals: to expose the book’s thesis to a wider audience; to make some money; to bring (visual) life to the text; and to uncover or produce new material that extends or reinforces the book’s thesis.

It’s not immediately obvious which of these goals Alister Barry was trying to achieve in adapting for the screen Nicky Hager’s history-changing account of the National Party’s 2005 election campaign, The Hollow Men. Leaving to one side its financial success, the film achieves none of the above goals convincingly.

Hager’s The Hollow Men (2006) achieved nothing less than a change of leadership of New Zealand’s most successful political party, providing abundant evidence to support his thesis that National had run an unusually deceitful and deceptive election campaign in 2005, which was profoundly contemptuous of the New Zealand people. The book was meticulously researched, closely argued and, with a few exceptions, convincing in its argument that the gulf between what National leadership group believed in private and what they said in public was unconscionably wide. If Helen Clark’s great strategic insight in 1998-99 was that New Zealand voters would reward a government that was straightforward and upfront about its agenda, and that proceeded deliberatively to deliver on its election promises, Hager proved beyond significant doubt that Don Brash and his closest advisors had still not, almost a decade later, come to the same conclusion.

Yet Barry’s film adds almost nothing to this debate. The documentary is pedestrian and proves nothing much more than that politicians and their advisors are rather cynical beings. Partly this is due to the nature of the source material – even with talented voiceover artists, it’s hard to make emails sexy on screen. But Barry also suffers from a lack of new information, analysis or insight.

There appear to be only two kinds of “fresh” material the documentarian has uncovered or produced. The first consists of a few interviews with political experts and social commentators, such Victoria University political scientist Jon Johansson and Press political editor Colin Espiner. Their words, admittedly wise, are rendered perfunctory by how fleeting and disjointed their appearances are. The second is footage filmed surreptitiously of Brash speechwriter and strategist Peter Keegan relaxing in his home – reading the newspaper and closing his curtains. For a film lecturing politicians about ethics, such a tactic – filming someone in their living room with neither their permission nor their knowledge – was breathtakingly hypocritical and counterproductive.

This is not to say that the National Party, under Brash’s leadership, comes out of the documentary with much credit intact. The film’s depiction of Brash’s Orewa speech on race relations, which caused an unprecedented political earthquake in terms of poll support for the two major parties, adroitly exposes the utter vacuity of the Brash set-up. This major speech, which referred to “special privileges” enjoyed by Maori and condemned Labour’s “race-based” policies, had almost no public policy underpinning to it. Asked for details of race-based policies they would scrap when in government, or for examples of the special privileges that Maori enjoy, National dismissed all such enquiries as the work of “nitpickers”. This was not an intellectually serious and honest speech of political scholarship, but a cheap and incredibly successful marketing gimmick.

But this one revealing patch is obscured by a blizzard of other issues that the filmmaker throws at us – Barry, gifted a wealth of material by Hager, fumbles this embarrassment of riches. What emerges is not a coherent or compelling story, but a jumble that feels more like the seeds of several documentaries than a single, standalone film.

Barry would have been far better to concentrate on one or two scandals, and seek to add more detail (and perhaps more revelations) to them. For but one example, could he shed any more light on the plan of the Talley brothers to give Brash $1 million to buy his own set of advisors, out of the watchful eye of the National caucus and away from the Parliamentary complex? For another, what role, if any, did John Key play in brokering the relationship between Exclusive Brethren members with serious money to burn and the National leadership?

But instead of unleashing his investigative powers on such questions, Barry renders Hager’s impressive, complex, detail-heavy book into a muddled and disorganised film.

Hager could be forgiven for being disappointed with Barry’s work (though, as the film’s “author and researcher”, he bears some responsibility for the end product). And, in fact, the most interesting aspect of the DVD is a 20-minute “interview” with Hager thrown in as a special feature. (Though “interview” is the wrong word, because we don’t hear any questions – just Hager offering a lengthy, but pithy, exposition of his book’s major themes.) He offers a punchy description of modern political strategy and media management, and a call to arms for those who might wish for a politics with higher aspirations. In his descriptions of “inoculating” troublesome issues, avoiding talking about issues that don’t suit you, and repeating catchphrases ad nauseum rather than engaging with journalists’ questions, you could have been forgiven for thinking Hager was talking about John “The Issues That Matter; Ambitious for New Zealand” Key or Helen “Trust Me” Clark. That in itself demonstrates the enduring value of Hager’s Hollow Men trilogy – the book, the documentary and the play. The manipulations it exposes will be repeated and repeated in elections the world over until the media and the public find a way to punish the manipulative and deceptive slickster and reward the warts-and-all authentic straight-shooter.

See also:
» Secrets and Lies: The Hollow Men
» Politics Gone Bad: The Hollow Men
» The Hollow Men: Theatre Review [A] [B]
» The Hollow Men: Book Review