Doc Corner: 'The Kingmaker' and 'On the President's Orders'

By Glenn Dunks

Disingenuousness is a disaster for a documentary. I recently watched two documentaries about St*ve B*annon and while it’s obvious he is a despicable human and despite whatever I may have felt about the movies themselves, one thing you can never call that man is disingenuous. He truly believes every that he says.

The same cannot be said for former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, who is the narrative thrust and central subject of The Kingmaker. Something of a natural progression for director Lauren Greenfield, whose earlier films The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth have each dealt with the lives of people with too much time and money. Marcos is foregrounded for the documentary’s first half and listening to her seemingly endless self-aggrandizing about beauty, love, and this idea she holds so dear of being a mother to the Filipino people is – to be perfectly honest – a complete bore.

I have no doubt that Greenfield was limited somewhat in the scope of her questioning in order to be granted the privilege of capturing the then 86-year-old cultural icon on film. Still, that doesn’t forgive the film playing right into her crocodile tears and lovingly framed portraits of her and her illegally amassed possessions.

It isn’t until The Kingmaker’s second half that something approaching genuine intrigue enters the fray. As the horrors of her husband’s presidential reign are revealed in painful testimonials from some of his victims (those who survived, anyway) and the Marcos family matriarch’s revamped bid for corrupt political power come into clearer focus – not to mention the way her family has globbed onto that of then Presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte – make for a far more inquisitive and involving film.

It also makes The Kingmaker an even more frustrating feature than it would have been had Greenfield remained focused solely on Imelda Marcos and her shoes and her statues. There is a film’s worth of political bastardry in the doc’s pre-credit title cards alone. Was the director seduced by the allure of having Marcos on camera? Perhaps. That damned island of Calauit, for instance, with its imported wild giraffes, zebras and monkeys feels like a gift to the movie for its sheer absurdity, yet despite repeated returns to it far too little is made from it beyond a muddy inbreeding metaphor. There’s half a great movie here and another half that rather shamelessly bathes in its subject’s empty platitudes, never digging much deeper than what the nightly news had to say.

The same cannot be said for James Jones and Olivier Sarbil’s On the President’s Orders, which examines Duterte’s reign of murderous anti-drug policies since his election in 2016 and the bloody stains it is leaving on a nation. Told in frightening close-up, this is an uncompromising film that will make any audience member sit up. A far more realistic end to the rise of far-right populism than, say, The Handmaid’s Tale (and not just because it is, well, a documentary), there is nothing exploitative here although Jones and Sarbil thankfully inject a hefty dose of technical proficiency into their film so that even amid the exceedingly grim proceedings it never resting on the laurels of its subject.

Likewise, The Nightcrawlers, a National Geographic short documentary that, like the Jake Gyllenhaal film that shares a title, follows the night-time photographers and cameramen who cover the grisly murders of the Philippines drug war. Both The Nightcrawlers and On the Presidents Orders most alarmingly also follow some of the masked assassins who, thanks to the President, have finally found a means of releasing their angry bloodlust and are both damning critiques of an unravelling society.

Release: The Kingmaker is in limited release via Greenwich Entertainment, and On the President’s Orders can be streamed on PBS. I am unsure how people will see The Nightcrawlers since it obviously won’t be on Disney+! Do they still have their own TV channel?

Oscar chances: I think On the President’s Orders is too low profile, but I suspect the other two will be on the short-lists of both feature and short documentary.