HILLARY ELEGY

On major streaming platforms this weekend:

When I'm a Moth--Just after graduating from Wellesley, Hillary Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, spent part of the summer of 1969 in Alaska. She slummed around, working menial jobs, including, very briefly, cleaning salmon in Valdez. By her own account, she didn't like the work and had little aptitude for it, complained about the conditions at the facility and was fired after a week, shortly after which the place closed down.

The details of this peculiar episode are a bit vague, so filmmakers Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak are at pains to admit that this indie is a work of fiction; "So is the United States political situation," they add. They refer to their movie as an "un-biopic."

In an adventurous mood after getting fired, Hillary, played with amusing affectlessness by Addison Timlin, invites two unemployed Japanese fishermen (TJ Kayama and Toshiji Takeshima) who had been staring at her to join her for drinks. Gradually she bonds with the younger man, and talks to him in endless circles about her ambition, her lack of authenticity, her inability to see other people as real.

The movie is slow, but it has a certain moody power, a quietly sinister, Altman-esque atmosphere. I'm still not sure what Cotler and Zyzak were after, however. For a while I even wondered if this was some kind of covert art-house reactionary canard; I kept waiting for Hillary to commit a murder or something. At one point we even see her beginning a letter "Dear Saul..."; presumably to right-wing froth trigger Saul Alinsky.

More likely, though, When I'm a Moth is just an attempt to explore the "problem" of Hillary--in short, why she lost. But the answer may not be as complicated as her being hollow and soulless, even if she is.

It may simply be that she was a woman, and of no particular public charm or oratorical power, and she was placed in the wretched position of playing straight man to a sexist professional clown. It's almost as if she and her opponent played out in presidential politics the drama that Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs played out in sports. In the tennis world, it was a comedy; in the political world it was a tragedy.