Moynihan

Moynihan is a skillfully produced documentary about Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003), the government official, public intellectual, and four-term senator from New York. It is both informative and engaging. Its writer and codirector, Joseph Dorman, demonstrates his particular talent for making ideas come alive on the screen—a talent already evident in his earlier films such as Arguing the World (1997), about the New York intellectuals. Indeed, Moynihan concentrates more on the thinker than the politician. Moynihan's Senate career gets only fifteen minutes at the end of the film and even then, the main image of him is as a polymath who “wrote more books than many of his [Senate] colleagues read.” Moynihan effectively interweaves its subject's personal, intellectual, and political trajectories. It begins with Moynihan's role in the Department of Labor under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and ends with his time in the Senate, while flashing back to earlier moments in his life. It makes abundantly clear Moynihan's most appealing qualities such as his wit, intelligence, and genuine concern for governance. It draws effectively on interviews with a wide range of experts and on a wealth of fabulous photographs and footage. Though not directly addressed in the script, one particular treat is the chance to witness the development of Moynihan's sartorial style. He was always concerned with his clothes, ordering tailored suits from London. As the documentary footage makes clear, his fashion choices involved far more than the iconic bowtie that Moynihan wore as a senator

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