Documentary Film

[samplegirl]

The Last Republican, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend and is still seeking distribution, frontloads the barbed exchanges between the filmmaker and his subject, who seem to share little in common beyond being born in Illinois. “You have contempt for what I believe,” Kinzinger says to Pink early on, and shortly thereafter he characterizes the director as being “basically a communist.” (“Progressive,” Pink faintly mumbles off-camera.) Although he was a featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention in August, Kinzinger is no political moderate. He may have thrown his weight behind Kamala Harris in this election cycle, but as he told the Los Angeles Times in Toronto, that’s in part because her approach to foreign policy is more hawkish than Trump’s. Swept into office in the 2010 elections as part of the tea party wave, Kinzinger pushed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to preserve the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortions. So he wasn’t an obvious candidate to break with his party in 2021, when he was one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of impeaching Trump, and one of two to serve on the Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.

Slate.com

[erronis]

1. Hi. Gentle suggestions: Put the film's name in title (with Kinsinger) and add paragraph breaks to the body.

From Slate:

A New Documentary About The Last Republican Finds an Unexpected Source of Hope

Adam Kinzinger’s vote to impeach Trump led to his downfall. The movie about him is surprisingly optimistic.

How did a liberal Hollywood director end up making a documentary about a conservative Christian politician? The answer, explains The Last Republican’s Adam Kinzinger, is simple: Hot Tub Time Machine.

Steve Pink is, in fact, the director of the John Cusack vehicle about a time-traveling Jacuzzi and its sequel, as well as a co-writer of High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank, none of which would make him an obvious choice to profile Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who effectively ended his political career by voting to impeach Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection. And that may be why Kinzinger, who hints that he was approached by several other filmmakers, granted Pink access to what turned out to be his final 14 months in office. It’s not a particularly hard-hitting documentary, and despite the broader implications of Kinzinger’s fate, the movie stays narrowly dialed in on its singular subject, his family, and his staff. But the intimacy that spans both sides of the camera, guarded and combative as it sometimes is, ends up being key to extracting a note of hope from a story that could otherwise just be a downbeat cautionary tale.

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