In ‘Hillary,’ a Political Warrior Weighed Down by Her Armor

“You got points for not being emotional,” Clinton recalls about her days as a woman in a mostly male law school. “When you train yourself like that and then you move fast-forward into an age where everybody wants to see what your emotions are and how you respond and all that, it’s really a different environment.”

The later hours of “Hillary” are less revealing. In part, it’s the much-told material: the “baking cookies” blowups of Bill’s 1992 campaign; the personal and public crucible of his sex scandals and impeachment; the Senate and the State Department and the rise and fall and rise and fall of her reputation.

And in part, there’s that armor. Clinton can be engaging and animated talking about her school days or the “makeup tax” in time and effort paid by female candidates. But pressed on her own campaign mistakes or painful moments of her past, she can be as guarded as she was on the trail. (In this sense, the most-publicized quote from “Hillary,” in which Clinton said that “nobody likes” her former opponent Bernie Sanders in the Senate, was a rare moment of allowing herself to be impolitic.)

Then again, you could argue that that guardedness — everything it says about who is and is not permitted to be “authentic” in our culture, and who gets punished either way — is itself one of the main subjects of “Hillary.”

Another is the relation between the American electorate and Clinton, who for decades has served as the target-in-chief of a larger culture war, the receptacle for every feeling, positive, hopeful, hateful or resentful, that people have about gender relations, power and — forgive me — “likability.”

It’s this invisible dynamic that often drives “Hillary.” Near the end, my colleague Amy Chozick, who wrote about her experience covering Clinton’s campaign in “Chasing Hillary,” recalls voters telling her that they’d gladly vote for a woman, just not (all together now) “that woman.” But, Chozick asks, “did 30 years of sexist attacks make her that woman?” (The question is all the more pointed given the experiences of several that-women in the 2020 primary.)