The real drama in the 'Mayor Pete' documentary isn't the ups and downs of a campaign, or even Buttigieg’s political prospects. What you see instead is more basic: a story about a man who was unsure of how, or how much, to share himself with the world.
The first voice you hear, somewhere off-camera, belongs to Jesse Moss, the filmmaker.By this point, Moss has spent 11 months with his subject, filming him backstage at events, in his home, in his car, at the airport, in every session of debate prep he held with his campaign advisers. But as the new documentary “Mayor Pete” opens, the director is asking for help. The person seated across from Moss is not Pete Buttigieg, but his husband.
“I was very stymied by that,” Moss told me ahead of the film’s release this Friday. “There were moments where I threw up my hands in frustration and despair.” In debate prep sessions, when Buttigieg rehearses his response to a police shooting of a Black man in South Bend, his senior adviser Lis Smith says, “He’s comin’ across like the f---ing tin man up there.” When he talks about his experiences as a gay man, she tells him it’s like he is “reading a f---ing shopping list,” she says. “You’re not, like, f---ing, an anthropologist here.
Buttigieg, a skilled narrator, is President Biden’s most prominent messenger, on the Sunday shows nearly every weekend. | Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video Weeks later, Moss remembers filming him from the passenger seat of a car. Buttigieg was in the back, reading or dialed into a call, Moss watching his face. “It was placid. I wouldn’t say blank — that’s not the right word — but it was impenetrable,” he says. “And yet I found it fascinating because I thought, what is going on? He’s juggling a lot of balls in the air here.
Buttigieg, in particular, laments what he calls the “gamification” of politics, but it’s Chasten who is constantly pushing up against what he feels are the boundaries of the campaign. When he wants to start telling audiences about the couple’s difficulty having kids — “it’s something very real and felt by a lot of people” — a staffer tells him it’s a bit too intimate to bring up publicly.
“My way of coming at the world, the stronger the emotion is, the more private it is,” Buttigieg says. “And it is a strange thing, because politics is an emotional pursuit, of course.”— were you able to “be your true self on the campaign trail?” — is at the center of every run for office, and of every documentary that tries to reveal the harrowing gauntlet that is American presidential politics.
Now a father to twins, Buttigieg has not participated in the promotion of the film. The only staff member interviewed in the documentary, the campaign manager, Mike Schmuhl, declined to discuss the project, too.
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