Gonzo Girl
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“You gotta give good plane.” That’s what Alexandra Pelosi learned from spending the 2000 presidential campaign right behind George W. Bush with a digital camera, making her first movie, “Journeys With George,” which was released in 2002. Making that goofy, happy mess, Ms. Pelosi says she observed that the future president “gave good plane” as he wandered through the press section of the campaign jet. This time, she reports gloomily that candidate John Kerry “does not give good plane,” and it stings.
There’s no question Ms. Pelosi gives good plane; she sidles up to us and whispers sweet, funny, innocent things. It’s like she’s running for America’s Sweetheart. But the mousy movie director doesn’t quite qualify for that, so she’ll settle for alternately pandering to and needling the men who want to be president. She does so expertly in “Diary of a Political Tourist,” her new HBO documentary, which airs tonight at 8 p.m. “Tourist” is equal parts groundbreaking and wacky. Like it or not, Ms. Pelosi has become the closest thing we have to Hunter S. Thompson on the contemporary American political scene; she’s reporting on the dance the way the great Rolling Stone writer once did. She may not be nearly as profound, but the effort itself offers reason enough to rejoice.
This time it’s John Kerry’s show, which will no doubt relieve Mr. Bush. When Ms. Pelosi first confronts the president with her camera for the new film, he stares her down and sneers: “Would you please get rid of the camera once and for all? I made you famous once. I’m not going to make you famous again.”
“Don’t you miss me and the camera?” Ms. Pelosi asks Mr. Bush. “Don’t you miss your old friend? It’s your old friend. Don’t you miss it?”
Mr. Bush smiles. “I do miss you,” he says. And why not? The Pelosi paradox is that she has a tendency to promote the enemy. The 33-year-old daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader of the House of Representatives and a liberal firebrand, can’t escape the clutches of the charming Mr. Bush, and he knows it. But there are only so many times Mom can sneak her into a White House Christmas party (though the shot of Republicans dancing at that party is easily the funniest thing in the movie.) Much of “Diary” devotes itself to the Democratic debacle; there’s terrific coverage of Sen. Graham’s aborted effort (in which he confesses his showbiz ambitions), and of Rep. Richard Gephardt comparing himself to a Baptist minister as he grins his way across Iowa. She captures the Democrats at their most pathetic and groveling. When Sen. Lieberman stuffs a fried Twinkie in his mouth at a State Fair in Iowa – and then declares to Ms. Pelosi, “In my vision of America’s future, there will be a place for fried Twinkies” – it’s hilarious and tragic, up there with the best of Mr. Thompson.
Ms. Pelosi knows just how to find the emotional content of a visual, or a conversation. Her camera catches John Kerry as he kicks a pebble around on a road, looking lonely and pathetic. She zooms in on Mr. Gephardt’s face as he gets heckled by a passerby. When Howard Dean lugs his suit bag over his shoulder to board his newly downsized campaign plane, Ms. Pelosi films it. You can almost see the pain in the candidates’ eyes as they acknowledge to themselves how likely she is to engage them, with her persistence and her camera – and how horribly inevitable it will look when they eventually lose. She asks point-blank, how-do-you-feel questions and seems oddly obsessed with death. “Are you a dead man walking?” she asks Mr. Kerry at one point. “Senator, a month ago you were dead,” Ms. Pelosi starts another conversation with Mr. Kerry in March of 2004. It’s delivered in squeal; she sounds like a cross between the cutesie-phony Katie Couric and the aw-shucks Larry King. But somehow she pulls it off.
I’m not sure I like it as much when Ms. Pelosi tries to explain. She detracts from her own raw genius by always trying to give it a spin, or attach a tune to it that somehow clarifies. At first I admired the wacky notion of setting John Kerry’s political stumbles to the strains of the Eagles’s “Desperado,” but when she returned to it I was bored. (The musical opportunities ought to be endless here.) Her narration often veers into the inane, such as her declaration that “Kerry went from zero to hero.” At one point, after one huge Dean rally in the early months, she concludes: “Was it a coronation? Maybe it was more like a kiss of death.” There’s death again!
I admire the way Ms. Pelosi makes the most of her mistakes and her weaknesses. She’s hopelessly and obnoxiously determined to be famous, but maybe she deserves it. When she allows candidates to take her camera and turn it on her, she gets the best material; it’s liberating, somehow, to see Ms. Pelosi’s sweet, smiling face mooning the spotlight. This time it’s Mr. Kerry who has been dodging the Pelosi interview, but he finally agrees to an in-flight session – and, at long last, gives good plane. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Kerry are the love story in “Diary of a Political Tourist,” and it’s a happy ending.
It’s great to have Ms. Pelosi back making movies; she was smart to stay with HBO’s documentary guru Sheila Nevins, who gave her complete creative freedom, after being courted by all the networks in the wake of “Journeys With George.” “Tourist” wouldn’t have worked in short snippets on the evening news. But from hundreds of hours of raw footage, Ms. Pelosi – producer, writer, director, and co-star – has put together a hugely entertaining 90 minutes of television. She’s Gonzo Girl.