Starting about a year before the Iowa Members’ vote on February 3, 2020, the affectionate documentary “Major PeteFollows the lengthy campaign of Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Ind., And now secretary of transport. Like the recent documentary “Fauci”, it is a largely inconspicuous, even glamorous portrait of Buttigieg as he strives to become the youngest and first openly gay president of the United States. (To be fair, Jesse Moss’s film deals with Buttigieg’s controversial handling of the fatal shooting of a black man in June 2019 by a white police officer in the South Bend. But Buttigieg’s general failure to connect with black voters is largely ignored .) Buttigieg, whose husband Chasten appears throughout the film, in interviews and in the background of the campaign, is confronted with an incredibly jerky look. “I love PivotTables,” he cools when he sees a colleague working on an Excel spreadsheet. The subject of the film, by his own admission, carefully controls his emotions most of the time. His struggle to reconcile what he calls “authentic” with the desire of voters to get to know him better is one of the most interesting aspects of the film, but the sense of alienation that keeps Mayor Pete, as he is called, within breathing distance. is also one of the disadvantages of the documentary. R. Available on Amazon. Contains strong language.
96 minutes.
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