"A powerful film with a radical message": Sarah Owen reviews: 'Prime Minister'
Jacinda Ardern | Image: © Magnolia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection / Alamy
3 min read
This visually stunning documentary presents a moving and intimate portrait of an extraordinary leader
If Jacinda Ardern hopes to make one point following her six-year tenure as prime minister of New Zealand, it is that a normal person with no lofty ambition or sky-high ego can have high office thrust upon them while pregnant, run a country with kindness, empathy and respect, and succeed.
The other point Ardern makes during her feature-length and visually stunning documentary Prime Minister is less convincing: that her achievements during her time in office were no more extraordinary than anyone doing their best, reading their briefs and taking the most rational decisions based on the evidence available.
This exposes Ardern’s humility, but fails to recognise that across the world Covid-19 tested leaders like never before. I sat on the Health and Social Care Committee during lockdown and heard firsthand how the chaos and confusion running through Downing Street resulted in garbled messaging and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
Prime Minister is a quietly radical message that in a time of self-serving and cynical politics, there is much to be gained through kindness and emotional awareness
Prime Minister takes us into Ardern’s mind as the pandemic bore down on New Zealand, through short self-taped vignettes and audio diary entries. We see how, juggling a toddler, she goes through thousands of pages of briefs in bed, and commits to lead by the science. In March 2020 we hear one entry where she says, with astonishment, “Boris Johnson wants to just let it rip”. There could not have been a starker contrast of leadership between our two nations at that time.
That is what makes Ardern’s premiership so extraordinary, though I am sure she would reject that praise, and carries lessons for any of us in politics hoping to make the world a better place. Here is a woman who reluctantly took on leadership before an election, with no time to focus group and poll messages – she had no choice but to just be herself.
Through Covid, the response to the 2019 Christchurch shootings, domestic policy fights and more, Prime Minister is a moving and quietly radical message that in a time of self-serving and cynical politics, there is much to be gained through kindness and emotional awareness. When driven by a strong progressive mission, politics doesn’t need ego, bravado and cynicism to succeed. Ardern turns the old-fashioned idea of what leadership “should” look like on its head.
Of course, running through Prime Minister is the fact that Ardern was just the second world leader to ever give birth in office, to her daughter Neve, who plays an adorable and ever-present background role throughout.
You get the sense Ardern was keen to avoid making the documentary just about being a mother, but rather that juggling the responsibility of mother and work was a simple fact of life as it is for women everywhere. A fact dependent on a supportive partner, an accommodating and kind workplace and colleagues, and nonetheless filled with worry, illustrated by her determination to breastfeed to “justify” keeping baby Neve at her side. I know there will be working mothers everywhere familiar with this feeling.
Prime Minister is an extremely moving and intimate portrait of Ardern as a leader and as a human being. It is also a message to leaders everywhere that it is possible – and desirable – to lead with heart. I hope we see many more leaders of this conviction across the world.
Sarah Owen is Labour MP for Luton North and chair of the Women & Equalities Select Committee
Prime Minister
Directed by: Michelle Walshe & Lindsay Utz
Venue: Selected cinemas
