Suggesting a movie-style book promotion video, Dawn Porter’s The Way I See It takes an interesting subject—behind-the-scenes reflections from Barack Obama’s White House photographer, Pete Souza—and illuminates it through the lens of hagiography. As in her recent John Lewis: Good Trouble, a well-timed but similarly disappointing documentary that took a too-narrow approach to its titanic subject, Porter misses showing what’s truly interesting about Obama by making the assumption that everybody in her audience already loves him (and given that this film is being broadcast on MSNBC in the slot following The Rachel Maddow Show, that may be a safe assumption).
The somewhat awkward Souza is presented across the documentary as a reluctant warrior in the cause of reminding Americans that presidents tend not to act like Donald Trump. Porter structures The Way I See It around his publicity appearances promoting his books of Obama photography before beaming Democratic audiences, interleaving those segments with him talking about his post-2016 evolution from just-a-job photojournalist to anti-Trump activist. He registers as well-meaning and utterly sincere, if still a bit star-struck about his former boss. But well-meaning and sincere doesn’t make for a particularly compelling documentary.
Time and again, Souza references his apolitical past. Despite having been White House photographer for Ronald Reagan, who he describes in fairly glowing terms, Souza doesn’t appear to have taken much notice of who was doing what in the White House while working for the Chicago Tribune and National Geographic prior to 2008. Because of that, he seems initially to have taken to the Obama White House as just another subject. The film comes most alive when he’s talking shop, relating his thinking about or the circumstances around the various pictures from those eight years that Porter liberally spotlights throughout. But apart from a brief segment on how presidents like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson actively used photography to present an image of their administrations, scant light is shed on the technical or artistic aspects of Souza’s role as a White House photographer.
Rather, his and Porter’s focus is more on celebrating the eight years of Obama’s presidency. Souza lays out an argument for this that’s initially persuasive. Unlike in Souza’s time, the Trump administration sharply limits photographers’ access (in one scene, Souza dissects the clear fakery of one obviously staged shot showing Trump glowering in the Situation Room as he imagines a president is supposed to look). As a result, real-time documentation of history, which is ultimately how Souza sees how the job of White House photographer, has been replaced by propaganda. Souza’s anger over the denigration of his old job, and the ways in which Trump has degraded the presidency has led to his now operating as seemingly a full-time agitator, sending out a steady stream of old Obama photos on his Instagram feed with satiric captions aimed at reminding Americans of what presidential dignity looked like.
But rather than taking a systematic look at the White House photographer as an institution, the presidency, or the technical merits of the pictures themselves—many of which are quite stunning, momentous, and even emotional—The Way I See It practically turns into a sizzle reel of Obama glamour pics. Again, Souza’s fandom and personal connection to Obama and the family is clearly sincere, given how he tears up during his recollection. But at some point, the film shifts toward its own kind of propaganda. Near the end, Porter slips in a montage of pictures showing anti-Trump and anti-police brutality protests, which make little sense as none were shot by Souza. The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.
One could see The Way I See It as yet another casualty of the Trump years. The despair felt by his foes is so all-encompassing that it can leave them susceptible to the most well-meaning but superficial film as long as it takes a sufficiently strident view of Trump. For them, Souza and this film may be some kind of balm or reminder of a better time. But its simplistic good man/bad man message can’t help but feel more like a fairy tale than history.
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