‘Mario’ Review: Mario Cuomo Doc Is Dry but Persuasive

When Mario Cuomo is discussed today, it’s most frequently in the context of how disappointing his son Andrew has become (and Chris, too, if you happen to work in the media), or his universally relevant observation that politicians “campaign in poetry and govern in prose.”

It’s one of those maxims so indelible it’s hard to imagine that it emanated from any single person, and it hovers over every moment of Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt and Teddy Kunhardt’s new documentary, Mario, whether it’s being discussed or not.

Premiering at Tribeca, Mario is an interesting documentary, both hagiographic and pragmatic. It’s a documentary dedicated to yearning for what now seems like a fantasy politician, and a character study of an actual man whose difficulties reconciling aspirations with reality frequently left him disappointed — and ultimately left his most passionate supporters disappointed, too, when he declined to attempt the ascension to the country’s highest office in 1988.

It’s also a documentary conveyed entirely in prose, with nary a trace of poetry to be found; it’s easy to feel that this 87-minute film errs on the side of dry biographical recitation.

Told with the participation of all five Cuomo children — only Chris and Andrew’s presences are distracting and irritating — as well as his longtime wife Matilda, Mario prides itself on tracing Cuomo’s path as a man of his respective historical moments.

Cuomo was born in the Great Depression and grew up at a time when it was possible to see the impact of FDR and the New Deal on the success of his own immigrant family, across the home of his youth in Queens, and across the country. He came of professional age in the unruly New York City of the 1970s, amid a burgeoning resentment directed at the abandonment of local government, and he came of age as a leader in the 1980s when his time as governor of New York put him in ideological opposition to Ronald Reagan in every way.

The documentary is invariably disappointing, or at least disappointed, using Cuomo’s 1984 Democratic National Convention keynote address as its climax. The speech, whose writing and rewriting Andrew is able to effectively explain, remains an astonishing evocation of Democratic principles and ideals, the sort of galvanization the party has lacked outside of the tenure of Barack Obama, another politician thrust into the national spotlight with a convention keynote. As great as the speech is, the left’s lack of clear successors to Cuomo, both in that ill-fated 1984 election and in 1988 when the party waited breathlessly for months only to have Cuomo opt not to run, is invariably deflating.

It is, as writer Ken Auletta says multiple times, nevertheless illustrative of the importance of telling the stories of the people who didn’t become president but may have been all the more interesting for not reaching a singular pinnacle.

The documentary doesn’t wholly skimp on Cuomo’s humanity, whether it’s the story of the key advisor who died in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic or how competitive Cuomo was playing basketball with his kids. But these anecdotes are folded into the laundry list that is the rest of the film.

Despite the presence of Cuomo’s voluminous diaries, read with a lack of consistent framing by his children, the effort to find anything interesting to say about Cuomo the Man, rather than Cuomo the Public Figure, proves frustrating. We learn about Cuomo’s devotion to Catholicism and how he found ways to make his religion a consistent piece of his progressive ideology at a time when the right was aggressively co-opting anything resembling faith. It’s a valid observation, but it doesn’t go any deeper.

We get a few similarly superficial internal conflicts — the consensus builder with a streak of superiority, the politician who loved meeting people but hated campaigning — but more often than not, the documentary tells us about these traits directly instead of illustrating them. And when it does illustrate, the documentary leans on familiar period news footage, intercut with ultra-bland staged shots of an empty, book-filled office and fading on-screen text to animate sections from his diary.

It’s a Cuomo-ian contradiction that a documentary so lacking in emotion still generates a very visceral sense of what could have been. I was far too young to vote at the time, but perhaps because my parents had a colleague in academia who was a Mario Cuomo biographer, I vividly remember the sadness when Cuomo announced he wouldn’t run for president.

With those memories still present, Mario pushed me toward questions like “How did the Democratic Party lose the ability to articulate a message as frankly and inclusively as Mario Cuomo once did?” or “Where are the Mario Cuomos of today?” rather than hitting me hard on any artistic level. The thoughts linger, even if I remember no moment in the documentary generated by the craft of the filmmakers.