Moynihan

I saw this on Sunday, January 6, at All Saints Cinema in Tallahassee, and feel lucky to have been one of the first to see it and the first to review it here.

I was certainly aware of many things Dan Pat Moynihan did, yet the film put them together and added more. He was among the very top political thinkers and actors of the 20th century, compasionate, practical rather than dogmatic, and often helped to bridge the gap between political wings. We would be better off today had more people listened more carefully to him and followed his advice. I love the quote from George Will that while Moynihan was in the Senate, "he wrote more books than some of his colleagues read". (Not stated in the film is that Will wrote those words in the Washington Post upon Moynihan's death in 2003.)

The early parts of the film drag a bit due to thinness of contemporary visual materials, especially of video, leading to a lot of pan-and-scan, talking heads, and pictures of printed words. This is unavoidable for the time frame, but the story does become more vivid when covering the era of videotape.