102 min | PG-13 | September 18, 2020 | Focus Features
Pete Souza spends eight years a few feet from Barack Obama with a camera. Dawn Porter turns his archive into a feature-length argument that the country lost something it cannot get back. The photographs are the evidence and the eulogy.
Pete Souza serves as chief official White House photographer for two presidents. He shoots Ronald Reagan in the eighties and Barack Obama across two terms. Dawn Porter builds her documentary around the second job and the tens of thousands of frames it produces. The film presents itself as a study of a photographer at work. It is actually an elegy for a presidency Souza misses and wants the audience to miss with him.
Souza carries the film as himself. He is dry and unguarded and openly devoted to his former boss. The most revealing material covers his turn from neutral documentarian to political combatant, when he starts using his old photographs to needle the administration that follows. Samantha Power and Susan Rice supply testimony about the man inside the frame and the work behind the access. Archive footage of Barack Obama delivers the emotional payload, the candid moments with staff and children that Souza captures up close. The people on screen are not performing so much as mourning.
Dawn Porter directs without a credited writer and lets the images do the structural work. The film moves in a steady rhythm of full-frame photographs intercut with talking heads. Porter holds each still long enough to register the composition and the instant Souza chooses to freeze. The score swells under the most sentimental sequences and tells the audience exactly how to feel. That scoring is the film’s weakness. It reaches for emotion the photographs already deliver on their own.
This is a tribute, and it never pretends to be anything harder. Porter takes no interest in the failures or compromises of the years she documents. She wants to remind a specific audience of a tone and a temperament and a man who holds the office with care. The film succeeds completely on those terms and attempts nothing beyond them. It is a love letter, and it never asks the harder questions a love letter cannot answer.