What is Huma Abedin? She has spent 20 years as a high profile gofer for Hillary Clinton. Bill officiated her wedding. Hillary says Huma is her second daughter. Both of her parents were highly educated members of the Pakistani elite. Her mother is a college prof.
Huma has no accent, which seems strange for someone who spent so much of her youth in Saudi Arabia.
Huma is classically beautiful with a pretty face, well made, and hourglass figure. She dresses the way this middle-aged father hopes his three daughters will one day dress, in a feminine way, but with nothing too short or tight. Huma is over all well turned out and splendidly appointed.
Through most of the doc, Huma never seems to crack an actual smile. There are times when we see her teeth, when she is baring her teeth to show happiness, but she never quite brings the corners of her mouth up.
She seems to maintain a certain distance from the camera, from the campaign staff, from Anthony.
She seems oddly distant to her husband. The only real incidence of spousal intimacy we see occurs in an elevator when she asked him about his pants and tugs at the pocket.
Huma is uncomfortable in front of the camera. One scene were she reads a statement in an event called 'Women for Wiener'. It is painful, almost as if she has learned public speaking from a bad public speaker; come to think of it....she has, hasn't she?
After the scandal breaks we see Huma, humiliated and twister. It's hard to watch. She's going through an existential crisis at the extreme humiliation brought onto her by a man who has betrayed her twice (three times now at the time of this writing). She says at one point that the scandal was, 'Like living in a nightmare'. By the end of the doc her soul has died. The most heart wrenching scene comes on election night when Sydney Leathers is attempting to ambush Carlos Danger Danger. Huma says, 'I am not going through the indignity of being confronted by this woman'.
Throughout the film Huma and Wiener deal with every matter by considering how it will look how it would seem, how would their actions play on TV that night?
A note on the staff. The office is filled primarily with young hipster types. Many of them no doubt went to the best schools, NYU, Columbia, etc. They have degrees in English (as if you needed to go 200K in debt to read Dickens), Poli-sci (even more useless), maybe Journalism help us god. They loved Stewart and Colbert, now Bee and Noah. With one notable exception, anyone who watches will see, the young women are badly made up and don't know how to carry themselves. The men, well, I wouldn't want to be a woman sleeping next to one of these guys if I thought someone was breaking into the house.
This is the point at which we are supposed to note how bad we feel for these young idealists. Bullshit these kids are smug know-it-alls and they deserve it. Like Huma none of them seem to actually know how to do anything. Nor do any of them seem to know anything. Like Huma They went to the right schools and met the right people. They are young fixers in proximity to power, like Huma.
As noted in a previous post, Huma went to work for Hillary right after graduating. That's 20 years in proximity to the supreme power in America, the House of Clinton. She has made her career being Hillary's gofer and all around lick-spittle and trading off her proximity to power.
Soon she will not have even that.
