The Brink is Alison Klayman’s documentary portrait of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist (he shaped the ‘America First’ campaign, proposed the Muslim travel ban, etc.) and former boss of Breitbart News, the place where unsuccessful white men go to whine. The film follows him for 15 months from the autumn of 2017 as he attempts to organise far-right European parties into a ‘populist nationalist’ movement, and you may wish to look away when Nigel Farage smarms all over him as it’s not a pretty sight. (I’m a delicate flower, so could only watch from behind my hands.) But it is not insightful and, alas, utterly fails to capture the man behind the persona, if there is one. (He seems to have no personal life but did once try golf.)
At the time of filming, Bannon is living at the ‘Breitbart Embassy’, the smart townhouse in Washington DC where Breitbart has its headquarters. Does he have no proper home? He’s never asked. We’re never told. This place is $$$$$, but the funding remains murky. He wears two collared shirts, one on top of the other, for reasons that are also never explained, and his physique is, I would say, incipient W.C. Fields.
He is full of it. Trump wouldn’t have won without him ‘and he knows it’. Yet he didn’t mind being fired as he did not enjoy the White House. ‘There’s no glamour to the job and I hated every moment I was there,’ he lies. He is fervent about ‘economic nationalism’, which may be white supremacy by another name. Hard to know for sure. He travels to Rome and Venice and France and London via populist private jet (and while staying in populist five-star hotels), meeting the leaders of far-right parties like Filip Dewinter (from Belgium’s Vlaams Belang) who likes to commemorate the death of SS collaborators.
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