Prime Minister is an uncommon portrait of a politician, but not just because Jacinda Ardern was an uncommon politician. It’s uncommon because of the extraordinary level of private access to the woman who served as New Zealand’s 40^th prime minister from 2017 to 2023, including a significant amount of footage shot by her husband, Clarke Gayford, then only the father of her daughter, who was not born until Ardern was already serving. He has since become her husband, in another example of the couple’s narrative that they did everything in reverse.

Ardern reversed orders in politics at the time her country direly needed it, until politics reversed back on her and claimed her political career – though not, as this powerful document demonstrates, her humanity. Directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Waltze have given us a film that shows how a 37-year-old woman became the leader of her country while nursing a newborn, but how doing it all could never be enough, not in an already fractious political climate exacerbated by COVID-19. You’d describe it as a warts-and-all portrait, except that the uncommon – there’s that word again – grace of this woman makes the warts seem like beauty marks.

That Ardern’s career would be defined by her response to the pandemic, which was the envy of the world before it was the cause celebre of her country’s right wing, was one of the many things she could not have expected in a career that was largely unexpected. Prime Minister reminds us that Ardern would not have even been the Labour Party’s choice to lead the party, and ultimately the country, had not Andrew Little resigned his leadership role due to alarming opinion polls just two months before the 2017 election. Ardern pulled off the feat Kamala Harris could not pull off last year in the U.S., taking a rudderless campaign and turning it into victory.

That isn’t one of the explicit contrasts the film draws between New Zealand and the United States, though it does give us plenty of contrasts, both implicit and explicit, between Ardern and Donald Trump. In terms of explicit contrasts, Ardern is asked by a reporter whether she likes Donald Trump, and the only answer she’s willing to give is that she doesn’t know him and that it’s not a relevant question. Meanwhile, as she spends sleepless nights poring over documents about the science behind the spread of contagion, it is implied that Trump would never have lost that sleep, least of all because he barely reads.

Even before COVID sent her on the rollercoaster that lasted the remainder of her time as prime minister, Ardern had to survive the twin 2019 tragedies of the Christchurch mosque shooting and the Whakaari volcanic eruption. The former prompted the swift passage of new gun laws outlawing assault rifles, under Ardern’s firm direction.

Prime Minister does, understandably, proceed chronologically in its documenting of this period, but the list of Ardern’s accomplishments, as well as failures where she wouldn’t have done anything differently, does not begin to describe how this film works on a viewer. The film’s two female directors leave largely unspoken the notion of Ardern’s status as a woman in terms of her reception by her people, except where it specifically relates to her fitness for doing the job while actively pregnant or actively breastfeeding. Yes there is a certain misogyny built into this response, but it is at least defensible on the grounds of having little precedent in international politics. (Pakistan’s Benezir Bhutto had been the only previous world leader to give birth in office.)

The unspoken accusation – unspoken at least in polite company – is how her emotions affect her ability to govern, an issue every female politician must decide how to manage, even while it’s rooted in the ugliest parts of the patriarchy. For human beings with the sort of overdeveloped sense of empathy of a Jacinda Ardern, it’s particularly difficult to ask them not to allow their voice to waver when speaking about a tragedy that just cost the lives of 50 of her fellow citizens, some of them refugees her party had sought to protect. Prime Minister lets us see how this affected Ardern in her more private moments.

Fortunately, those private moments also feature a truly jovial relationship with her partner, Gayford, who is both an executive producer and a credited director of photography on the film. Had it not been for his initiative to capture what was happening with his partner during these tumultuous moments of her life, Utz and Walshe would not have had the bones on which to build their film.

There’s an honesty to this footage that resists the sense that it might exist only to paint Ardern in a better light. She evinces plenty of grumpiness, accusing Gayford of coming in with the camera at the wrong time or even mansplaining something to her. However, she also calls him out for staging a scene where he’s carrying a basket of laundry across the bedroom, a moment that gives them both – and us – a laugh.

The recent flap over Anthony Albanese wearing a Joy Division t-shirt was supposedly about the controversial meaning of that band’s name. However, the effective result has been positive for Albanese, in one of those moments that reminds us of something both Australians and Kiwis cherish: the notion that our leaders are just normal citizens.

Ardern was both normal, in that she was still essentially a young person finding her way and getting into motherhood unexpectedly, and exceptional, in that she possessed an incomparable ability to juggle her various responsibilities while making the sorts of decisions that history books will judge favourably. That it cost her death threats, the desecration of the Parliament lawn through weeks-long protests, a resignation from office, and ultimately a self-imposed exile to the United States, is a sad commentary on how politics, especially today’s politics, squashes the normal people our countries rely on to govern them.

 

Prime Minister opens in cinemas tomorrow.