Few people achieve the level of fame that renders them mononymous, and almost none of them are public health officials. But we all know who Fauci is: American Masters: Dr. Tony Fauci (now streaming on PBS) is the second documentary about the physician/scientist/immunologist who was head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, and, for better and worse, the American face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike 2021’s National Geographic biodoc Fauci, the newest episode of PBS’ long-running American Masters series foregoes the famous-talking-heads approach to filmmaking and follows Fauci with a camera crew for nearly two years, from early 2021 to his retirement from NIAID in late ’22. The film sticks wholly to his point of view, and gives us a different angle on a man a lot of us recognize, but maybe don’t know enough about.
AMERICAN MASTERS: DR. TONY FAUCI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: January, 2021: Fauci’s at home, watching President Joe Biden’s inauguration on TV. He tears up when “Amazing Grace” is sung, but his runny nose is more of a side effect of getting his second COVID vaccine the day before. Biden’s will be the seventh administration Fauci has worked with as head of the NIAID. “We’ve been through hell,” is his assessment of the previous year, when the COVID outbreak infected tens of millions of Americans and killed hundreds of thousands, and Fauci found himself entangled in the divisive political milieu that characterized President Donald Trump’s administration. Fauci is awake for a 3:30 a.m. virtual meeting so he may announce the United States’ formal reunion with the World Health Organization, which makes both sides of the call feel relieved.
With Trump out of the White House, Fauci feels a sense of freedom. He’d spent 2020 battling with the former president, fighting misinformation about the pandemic, and doing his damnedest to keep the public informed about the rapidly evolving data being accrued about the deadly virus. We see clips of him downplaying the use of masks early in the pandemic, then later changing tack and recommending that everybody wear them – a flip-flop that, near the end of the documentary, he admits was a mistake. But by that point, we have a better sense of his motivation as a public health official; it’s hard not to be convinced that his intent was pure, and he was trying to do the right thing. Now he fields a pile of requests for personal appearances, with advisers recommending and pooh-poohing them (on the pooh-pooh pile: a live introduction of the musical Chicago). We see him Zoom-chatting with Spike Lee and Stephen Colbert and elbow-bumping Tod Koppel – and get a sense that his greatest challenge may be communicating complex, frequently changing information to a world that only wants hard, fast, definitive and unambiguous soundbites.
Fauci sits at his kitchen table with his wife, Christine Grady, and they talk about the personal toll the COVID-related public scrutiny has wrought – he’s a tough-minded guy who grew up in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need 24/7 security in case anyone decides to follow up on the voicemail death threats he’s received. A biographical segment briefly detailing the beginning of his career in public health leads to the other major challenge of his life, in the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic began, and gay activists, weary of being ignored or roadblocked by the National Institute of Health under the Reagan administration, made Fauci the villain of their movement. In the present, Fauci sits with the very same AIDS activists over wine and cheese in his living room; they’re friends now, joking about their former adversarial relationship. It’s a direct result of Fauci, at the height of AIDS-related protests, walking into what he described as “the lions’ den,” where he sat down, listened and conversed with them. “I began to realize you were on the right side of history, and they (the NIH) were not,” he says.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: RBG was a warming hagiography of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, although this examination of Fauci asks a few more tough questions of its subject.
Performance Worth Watching: Fauci is center-stage almost 100 percent of the time – the only other interviewee is his wife – so be grateful that he’s a charismatic personality that can carry a nearly two-hour doc.
Memorable Dialogue: Fauci: “I’ve developed over the years the ability to tolerate a whole bunch of (bleep).”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: American Masters: Dr. Tony Fauci is a perfectly reasonable documentary about a man who’s devoted his life to science and public service, but that doesn’t mean the unreasonable among us won’t take issue with it and the perceived ideology they’ll claim it asserts. Those people are represented in the documentary, among the throngs of protestors holding signs reading, among other things, “FAUCI THE LIER” (sic). Throughout the film, Fauci insists he’s bipartisan and loyal only to science, and his decades of reputable work – although occasionally flawed, by Fauci’s own admission – back up that claim. But the fascinating thing about him is, he’s a call-it-like-he-sees-it guy, a Brooklynite down to his bones, who isn’t afraid to mix it up a little with bad-faith actors, which only further fuels his detractors, because in this context, “bad-faith actors” and “his detractors” are pretty much synonymous with “Republicans.” (The good: We get to see Fauci punch back at a moronic gasbag like Rand Paul. The bad: We have to listen to Rand Paul speak for more than two seconds to get to that point.)
The key to the film is intimacy. Director Mark Mannucci makes sure we get to know Fauci a shade or two deeper than the guy we know from TV, standing behind the podium at a press conference. The camera peers over his shoulder as his personal security gets tense when a car drives by slowly in front of his house, and it’s not one of his critics stalking him, just the guy delivering his lunch. There’s plenty here about our current divided America and Fauci’s place in it, illustrated during a segment in which he goes door-to-door in a predominantly Black neighborhood in D.C. and is greeted by a few friendly faces gobsmacked that this famous man is at their door, a mother he seems to have convinced to get the vaccine to help keep her children healthy, and a deeply skeptical man who will never be talked into getting the shot. Such is the cross-section of American ideologies, and it’s revelatory at the same time it’s wearisome, because we’ve seen so damn much of it by now.
The highlights here include Fauci’s candid sit-down with his AIDS activist pals (disappointingly, he never discusses his relationship with Reagan, whose administration stonewalled aid for the gay community during the epidemic), and the inevitable headlines that’ll spin off from the film addressing his shrugging ownership of his mistakes. He doesn’t say it outright, but he’s clearly wounded by the state of the country he’s served; at the same time, he wears a decidedly bemused expression when he listens to the nasty, threatening voicemails directed at him. He’s a complex man: “If I knew then what I know now, I would’ve done things differently,” he sighs, looking back at statements he made at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. It’s a very human thing to say, isn’t it? And if you’re not convinced by now that he was doing the best he could with good intentions, you never will be.
Our Call: American Masters: Dr. Tony Fauci is an insightful look into a complex man doing a difficult job in an impossible situation. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
