Hillary's America: The Secret History Of The Democratic Party movie review (2016)

That protégé is none other than Hillary Clinton, and after sneaking into the basement of a Clinton recruitment center, D’Souza learns the shocking truth about her as well. By “shocking truth,” of course, the information amounts to “largely discredited crap your uncle sent you on Facebook.” The tenor of this segment is set with D’Souza asking “Is Hillary really capable of enabling a rapist?” and it goes downhill from there as we get another rehash of husband Bill’s infidelities (there are many shots of a woman in a sexy black dress slinking out of various places), Hillary ranting through the halls of the White House, a recounting of that uranium scandal that turned out to be much ado about nothing and the possible depravations of the Clinton Foundation. As for Benghazi, he supposes that she refused to send in help because “she couldn’t figure out how to make a buck off of them.” As this segment ends, D’Souza denounces them for their “hateful rhetoric” before calling them “depraved crooks” who will “turn all of America into a plantation” if she is elected president. At no time, however, does he make any sort of case for an alternative to her in this election cycle. Even though the film is up-to-date enough to include a moment suggesting that Obama was responsible for the massacre in Orlando, there is, at most, one brief and vague reference to Donald Trump.

All of this is conveyed by D’Souza in the most cinematically inept ways imaginable. The film is less a coherent narrative than a compendium of slanders, innuendos, cherry-picked facts, blatant omissions, stuff taken almost directly from his earlier documentaries, terrible historical reenactments, a couple of interviews that convey additional information of a highly dubious manner and ironic clips from movies that you will wish that you had watched instead of this one (including “Metropolis” and “Evita"). From a filmmaking perspective, the whole thing is so amateurishly done that even those who fall close to D’Souza on the political spectrum should feel ripped off. Worst of all, it utterly fails at its mission of being the ultimate Hillary Clinton takedown by never laying a single glove on her. This is especially astounding, as even those inclined to support her could probably name a couple of things she has done in her years in the spotlight that are legitimately questionable—her vote for the war in Iraq and her embrace of the teachings of Henry Kissinger to name a couple—but instead of exploring those, D’Souza is more concerned with calling Bill Clinton a sex abuser but blaming it all on Hillary.

“Hillary’s America” may well be the single dumbest documentary that I have ever seen in my life—nearly two hours of poisonous bluster and anti-historical rhetoric that comes across like the desperate ravings of someone trying to make a few more bucks by rehashing the same nonsense before his gravy train finally leaves town. The closest thing I can compare it to are the strange and highly speculative documentaries that Sunn Classics used to crank out in the late Seventies—movies that breathlessly promised viewers that they would reveal the existence of life after death or the Bermuda Triangle or Noah’s Ark but only gave people clumsy reenactments, interviews with highly dubious experts and wild speculation without ever actually offering any of the concrete proof that they promised. Those films used to get huge audiences, but once viewers caught on to the con, interest dropped sharply. And if the drop in interest between D’Souza’s first two films is any indication (“2016” was a sizable hit but “America” came and went so quickly that he never makes reference to it once here), there is an excellent chance this film will face the same fate. The only intelligent thought the film has to offer comes at the very end when D’Souza admonishes people to go out and vote. Okay, he can’t, but the thought is still nice.