Last Man Standing, a documentary showing at the NZ International Film Festival, is a tribute to the left-wing political leader that borders on hagiography, writes Joel MacManus.

The difficulty with political documentaries is that the people most motivated to make a film about a politician are often those least capable of telling their story objectively. The breakout hit of last year’s NZ International Film Festival, the Jacinda Ardern documentary Prime Minister, managed to avoid that trap by focusing on the human story of someone trying (and sometimes failing) to take on the enormous burden of leading in a crisis.

This year’s contribution to the political documentary genre took the exact opposite approach. Last Man Standing follows the career of Jim Anderton, the former Labour minister who left the party during the Rogernomics era and led various other left-wing parties including NewLabour, the Alliance and the Progressives. It is made by people who loved him, for people who loved him, and almost every interviewee feels the same. The viewer is told, over and over again, what a great man he was; how he loved the people and they loved him back. 

The story is mostly told through news clips from Anderton’s career. The original footage consists mostly of former MPs and staffers from Anderton’s side of the aisle sitting in their living rooms and delivering a highly editorialised account of New Zealand political history and Anderton’s role in it. Director Gerd Pohlmann spent two days with Anderton before his death, interviewing him across a kitchen table, though these clips are mostly used as exposition rather than adding emotional insight.

As the film opens, the text on screen explains that New Zealand was a utopia of welfare and unity and high living standards before the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s came along and ruined everything. We’re shown a photograph of the 1984 Labour caucus while a former Anderton staffer states matter-of-factly that everyone in the photo except Anderton was corrupt.

The audience of grey-haired lefties at SkyCity Theatre cheered at lines from his speeches and jeered at footage of their old enemies. Several people were brought to tears when shown a scene from his 2018 funeral. But as someone who mostly knows Anderton as a trivia answer or a blue link in a Wikipedia article, I was left wondering: if he was really such a great man, why does the film need to put its thumb on the scale so heavily?

The title, Last Man Standing, forms part of a western motif, which pitches Roger Douglas as the villain and Anderton as the lone resistance. But the film is so insistent on straw-manning Douglas that it never builds him up as an effective antagonist. Various Anderton allies explain that Douglas and his neo-liberal co-conspirator Richard Prebble were manipulated by the Treasury, bribed by big business, and simply too stupid to understand that their ideas were bad and all of Anderton’s ideas were great. It makes no real attempt to explain the economic reforms of the 1980s; it presupposes that everyone watching already agrees they were universally terrible.

Douglas and Prebble are both still alive and could have provided an interesting insight into Anderton from an opposing viewpoint, but the filmmakers have no interest in this perspective. Every time they appear on screen, it’s in short clips intended to generate boos from the crowd.

The Alliance’s 2001 showdown, where progressive activists and party president Matt McCarten rebuked Anderton for his support for the war in Afghanistan, should be a powerful moment. But the film doesn’t trust its audience enough to give McCarten’s view a hearing – a few tightly cropped seconds of a young McCarten making his case to the party faithful are intercut with longer shots of a former Anderton staffer explaining that McCarten and his allies just didn’t get it. In the world of this documentary, Anderton cannot fail, he can only be failed. 

Last Man Standing is unashamedly a tribute to Anderton. It never claims to be a neutral piece of journalism. It will appeal to those who voted for him and want to relive their memories via an uncritical highlight reel. It will surely become a staple of socialist movie nights. But its insistence on celebrating Anderton rather than examining him ultimately sells both the film, and the man, short.