http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/arts/television/review-the-choice-2016-lets-the-chips-fall-where-they-may-on-clinton-and-trump.html 2016-09-25 23:35:05 Review: ‘The Choice 2016’ Lets the Chips Fall Where They May on Clinton and Trump This PBS documentary gives the candidates equal time while managing to avoid the journalistic pitfall sometimes labeled “false equivalency.” === Each presidential election since 1988, PBS’s “Frontline” has produced “The Choice,” an in-depth bio-documentary on the two major-party nominees — governors, senators, vice presidents, incumbents. (The 1992 edition did not include the businessman and independent candidate Ross Perot.) This year, the choice is different. And therefore “The Choice” is different. The change is clear in “The Choice 2016,” which makes its debut Tuesday on PBS, begins at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. President Obama, just after releasing his long-form birth certificate, conducts We see Mr. Trump sit, rigid-faced, fuming. “The Choice” suggests that his decision to run for president may have been born in that room. “Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump,” Ms. Manigault says. “It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.” The documentary, directed by Michael Kirk and written by him and Mike Wiser, pingpongs between the two candidates’ narratives. The half devoted to Hillary Clinton is more familiar, and not just because her husband was profiled in two past installments. We’ve seen presidential trajectories similar to hers before. Born Hillary Rodham and raised in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., she got her first taste of political fame with an idealistic commencement speech at Wellesley College that won her A key difference, of course, was that she was a woman. In sixth grade, her classmate Ernest Ricketts recalls, she was so bright that her fellow students predicted she would marry a senator. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, she was politically pressured into taking Mr. Clinton’s surname, and with it the conviction that she could never entirely be herself in public. This year’s “The Choice” has to tell the stories of two candidates who have been media fixtures for decades. There’s little surprising, for instance, in the section on President Clinton’s sex scandals, which falls back on the familiar conclusion that a marriage is a mystery to anyone outside it. The documentary does find memorable moments in the candidates’ childhoods. Mrs. Clinton’s father, Hugh Rodham, is described as a hard man who belittled her accomplishments and verbally abused her mother. She didn’t like to bring friends home. “The Choice” argues that this upbringing — along with the scrutiny of the White House years — contributed to a self-defeating secrecy and defensiveness. Mr. Trump’s father, the Queens-based real-estate developer Fred Trump, was tough, too. But he raised his son with the belief that he was born, genetically, to be a winner. The elder Trump taught his children the “racehorse theory of human development,” the author A terror of a child, he was sent to military school, where he and his classmates assimilated the worldview of Hugh Hefner’s 1960s Playboy. He brought those formative values — winning and swinging — to the real-estate business and celebrity scene. He found a mentor in Roy Cohn, once the counsel to the Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, who tutored Mr. Trump in legal and public combat: Never settle, always counterattack, declare victory even in defeat. As a developer, Mr. Trump had a mixed record, but he was skilled at branding — he even rebranded lying, in his book “The Art of the Deal,” as “truthful hyperbole.” Eventually, celebrity became his business, In the past, “The Choice” has often found parallels between its candidates despite their different policies and different paths. Not so much this year. The picture “The Choice” draws of Mrs. Clinton is of someone whose faults are within the familiar universe of politicians’ failings: caution, secrecy, suspicion, overcompromising. We see her evolve from the idealistic Wellesley student to a secretary of state who — learning of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s death while preparing for a TV interview — says with a laugh, “We came, we saw, he died!” Its sketch of Mr. Trump is of a different order. It presents him as petty, vain, self-dealing, image-obsessed, a master manipulator, uninterested in growing as a person, driven only to serve his greater glory. The narrative is sober, straightforward and presented without editorializing. But it is quietly, firmly damning. Which is not to say “The Choice” will necessarily change a single mind. This election has shown that Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Trump’s voters do not just have different opinions but occupy different psychic universes, operating under different definitions of qualification and character. In any case, affecting votes should not be the measure of political journalism. But the two hours are a striking example of how to avoid the journalistic pitfall sometimes labeled “The Choice” makes a good answer. You give the candidates equal time; you are not required to equal out their portraits. You present, as directly as you can, reality as you have found it. If someone doesn’t like that, so be it. That, too, is a choice, and it’s the right one.