Meeting Gorbachev (2019) by Werner Herzog
Meeting Gorbachev (2019) by Werner Herzog
Meeting Gorbachev is a 2018 biographical documentary film directed by Werner Herzog and André Singer about the life of Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union. The film features three interviews between Herzog and Gorbachev, conducted over the span of six months, and had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on September 1, 2018.
This is about as straightforward a documentary that you can get from Herzog. It's a bio pic with interviews of an 87 year old Gorbachev. It mainly reinforces the mainstream view. There's definitely interesting details I learned, and he comes across as a cute old man in the interviews. But there's nothing really new here. Gorbachev is shown as an erstwhile reformer that accidentally lead to the collapse of the USSR.
One thing that stood out was how it was taken as a given that German reunification was good. I get that it's a region that shares language/culture/history, and having hard borders is bad. Taking down those fortified borders was a good thing. But the nation-state of Germany has less than 200 years of history, and the track record is horrendous. Gorbachev's greatest flaw was being a deutschophile, and Herzog needs to apologize to Morgenthau immediately.
The part that deals with his remorse about the collapse of the USSR is good. He was at least self-aware enough to know that he should've sent Yeltsin to a gulag. At the same time, it's clear there was no real plan to strengthen the USSR. He drank the liberal kool-aid of promoting "democracy" instead of really reinvigorating a revolutionary program. The ending dealing with the death of his wife is genuinely touching.
I give it
/5