‘Prime Minister’ Review: Documentary About New Zealand’s Galvanizing Former Leader Offers an Intimate Look at a Woman in Power
The word kindness comes up over and over in Prime Minister as the key to Jacinda Ardern’s political philosophy. That sounds gooey and naive, but this disarming and intimate documentary about her six years as New Zealand’s head of government shows it to be the effective basis for a career that made her a global political star.
Ardern’s tenure included some head-spinning turns. She was 37 when the leader of the Labour party stepped down and she took over, becoming Prime Minister just seven weeks later. Around that time, she also learned that she was pregnant. She gained worldwide attention and praise for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and a shooting at a Christchurch mosque that killed 51 people, and she put progressive programs into place, including serious gun control laws.
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Then she stunned the public with her abrupt resignation in 2023, saying, “I no longer have enough in the tank” to deal with more crises in the future.
Prime Minister takes us inside her thoughts and feelings during those years, with home video shot by her partner, Clarke Gayford, a television host she married after she left office. (He serves as one of the film’s producers.) It also relies on candid contemporaneous interviews done for a New Zealand oral history project, as well as more recent conversations and archival news clips. Deftly edited together, they offer a rare firsthand look at the toll and demands on politicians when crises come flying at them.
The movie, now making its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, is also timelier than anyone might have expected. It would be a bit of an exaggeration, but just a bit, to say it trolls Donald Trump. It’s no accident that it includes deliberate, pointed contrasts that position Ardern as the American leader’s exact opposite in their approaches and objectives.
Prime Minister doesn’t have a very auspicious start, opening with Ardern walking her young daughter to school in Massachusetts, where she is currently a fellow at Harvard. Although she is seen giving a lecture to students, urging them to resist what she calls a damaging hyperpartisanship, at first the documentary seems unbalanced, almost defining Ardern by her motherhood. (She was only the second world leader to give birth while in office, after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto.)
But like Ardern herself, the two directors — Lindsay Utz, the editor of some major documentaries including American Factory, and Michelle Walshe — find a way to juggle the personal and political. That interplay between work and life gives the project its distinctive perspective and offers the most acute revelations. The lack of talking heads commenting on her enhances the intimate feel.
In a compassionate, unifying response to the Christchurch attack, Ardern quickly condemned it an act of terror and visited the victims’ families, her grief visible. In interviews here she adds what she couldn’t express so fiercely in public — that along with her sadness she was furious that the gunman was an Australian who came to her country explicitly to target Muslims and cause divisions. “My job was to be the calm voice,” she says. In the aftermath, she quickly got the legislature to pass laws eliminating sales of semi-automatic and assault weapons.
Throughout, the film glosses over the ins and outs of political wrangling, an approach likely to disappoint anyone obsessed with those details. But it makes up for it with its inside look at her responses in the moment. Ardern recalls on camera that at the start of 2020 she had resolved to be more zen. It didn’t last long. When COVID-19 hit a few months later, she basically shut New Zealand off from the rest of the world, and eventually put vaccine mandates into place, keeping the cases of the virus remarkably low.
At one point Gayford’s video shows Ardern and their daughter in the back of a car, as she says she has to give up breastfeeding because the baby isn’t feeding well. But alongside such personal moments are some sharp anti-Trump segments, with the editing and choice of news clips highlighting their differences. At a 2018 meeting of the United Nations, Ardern listens as Trump, then in his first term, gives his address and declares, “We reject the ideology of globalization.”
That scene is juxtaposed with Ardern being questioned by reporters afterwards. “We see ourselves as a member of an international community,” she says of her nation. Asked whether she likes Trump, she calls the question irrelevant. That moment is followed by her own U.N. address, where she states that “in the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism,” kindness is good place to start.
An even more pointed distinction comes when audio of a news report is layered over images of memorials and prayers for the victims of the mosque attack. The reporter indicates that Trump had asked Ardern what support the U.S. could offer, and that her response was, “Sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.”
The segment about her resignation is both compelling and too partial. By then, anti-vaccination protesters had occupied the grounds outside Parliament, and Ardern and her family were threatened with violence. In Gayford’s videos, you can see the weariness on her face. She sits holding her daughter and says she has weird dreams and never wakes feeling rested. When he asks her to describe her week, she replies, “If there is a subterraneal space that sits beneath hell, that.”
Talking about her choice to resign in an interview for the documentary, she points to her accomplishments and explains that she worried they might be overturned in the future: “If we remove me from the equation, then perhaps we won’t backslide on those things.” That sounds genuine as far as it goes but doesn’t directly acknowledge how low her poll numbers had gone — down to 30 percent, partly because of a weak post-COVID economy. Her brief earlier mention of sliding ratings hardly registers at this point in the film.
But even with its omissions and glossiness — a typical side effect of insider access — Prime Minister’s portrait of Ardern is so persuasive it might make you wish you could vote for her.
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