Did anybody happen to catch
Alexandra Pelosi’s tourist-form documentary “
Friends of God” about christian evangelicals last night on HBO? If you missed it, don’t waste your time. Pelosi (yes, she’s the daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) apparently has not improved on her “craft” since her last big HBO forays “Journeys with George” which followed then Texas Governor George W. Bush on the campaign trail in 2000 and Diary of a Political Tourist which attempted to show the carnival atmosphere of the 2004 Democratic presidential primary trail.
“Friends of God” (here’s a
preview) is a documentary that asks the same old questions (”how do you define marriage?”) of the same old characters (Jerry Falwell) and provides very little new information. The only real highlight of the film was that Pelosi spent a good portion of the film with the recently defrocked and publicly humiliated evangelical Pastor
Ted Haggard -
without knowing his dark underlying secrets (Pelosi finished the film before the Haggard
scandal broke and his recent notariety was acknowledged with a post production caption at the film’s end) - I mean how do you spend that much time with someone without realizing there might be something strange about him? . This is not to say that “Friends of God” is a negative portrayal, because it’s not… it just
is.
I’m not really sure why Pelosi’s work is so well received. The quality of production and the overall information gleaned is mediocre at best. Maybe it’s her political pedigree, or maybe it’s because the content of her work portrays typical middle Americans (such as the evangelicals who are so prevalent in the Heartland) from the “fly-over states” to liberal elitists of the east and west coasts in a way they find entertaining.
Whatever the case, this middle American probably won’t waste his time the next time.
