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The Washington Post - Alexandra Pelosi gets a call from her mother every day.
By 11 a.m. one day the week before she was set to release a documentary about her mother, Nancy Pelosi, she’d already spoken to the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives twice. Nancy Pelosi had called “at the break of dawn” to wish Alexandra’s teenage son a happy birthday. And when Alexandra’s Christmas tree toppled over a couple of hours later, as she was preparing her New York City apartment for a celebration, she phoned her mom to vent.
But for all their closeness, despite what Alexandra describes as their “glorious, beautiful relationship as mother and daughter,” the filmmaker failed to brief her mom on one little detail: that she was, uh, making this movie about her. “Pelosi in the House” premieres Tuesday on HBO.
The House speaker wasn’t the only one who didn’t get a heads-up about the film. Pelosi accompanied her mother to the state dinner at the White House two weeks ago and ran into Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). In footage of Alexandra’s that was shown publicly earlier this fall by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Schumer is seen working the phones (in Schumer’s case, an old-school flip phone) alongside Nancy Pelosi as they tried to get a handle on the chaos from a secure location. “I was like, ‘Oh, sorry about the whole January 6th thing.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t know you were filming,’” Alexandra told The Washington Post in an interview.
“I was sitting in the corner, you know, and he had much bigger problems than what I was doing,” she said. “And he’s a guy with a flip phone, so he doesn’t understand.”
In addition to the Jan. 6 footage, Alexandra Pelosi also shows her mom in bed, in a bathrobe, makeup-less with a bandage stretched across her nose. It shows her doing math to tally the probable votes of members on the Affordable Care Act bill. It shows her dancing in socks, with a grandbaby on her hip. At one point, Nancy Pelosi stands in her office, applying mascara in front of a gilded mirror. She sanitizes her hands and turns to a staffer with a request. “There’s one thing I want to ask you to do,” she says. “Somewhere in here I have a birthday card for my granddaughter, Madeline, 21 years old.” Then she strolls through the halls of the Capitol, steps to a lectern and opens the debate over impeaching the president of the United States.
Alexandra Pelosi, 52, does not pretend that her film is an unbiased documentary. How could it be? It’s about her mom, whom she loves and admires. “She has five very-high-maintenance children and she has nine grandchildren and she can’t just call it in. She can’t outsource that,” Alexandra said. “No matter what anybody says about her, the one thing they can never take away is the fact that she has five children who actually adore her.”
Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary portrays the speaker as a disciplined political tactician but also as a mother and grandmother who is caring for her family even as she leads a house of Congress. The film, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as a “one-of-a-kind document of one of the most important women in American history,” makes the argument that Nancy’s political career wasn’t the result of a decision so much as a destiny. “I didn’t really choose this life,” Nancy Pelosi tells her daughter in the movie. “It chose me.”
The same might be said of the filmmaker and her subject. Alexandra Pelosi told The Post she never wanted to make a movie about her mom — fearing that anything she put out would be “weaponized against my mother.” But, she says, “filming is a reflex” for her, and by virtue of the access privileges that came with being family she had amassed thousands of hours of footage of a notoriously private historical figure. In 2018, while Donald Trump was president and Democrats were poised to retake control of the House of Representatives, setting Nancy Pelosi up for another stint as speaker, the younger Pelosi decided it was time to begin working on a film in earnest.
Alexandra Pelosi got her start as a documentarian with “Journeys with George,” which is based on footage she shot using a handheld video camera while covering George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign for NBC. She had the greenlight from neither NBC nor the campaign to do a movie. It was Karl Rove (of course) who pegged her strategy. “He walks over to me and goes, ‘I get it. It’s better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.’ And then that was that. I was like, ‘That’s my motto.’”
Sure enough, Alexandra said, she never got permission to film in the Capitol. Her mother never signed a release. She says she never explicitly told her mother she was filming for a movie. “Why would I say to her, ‘Mom, I’m making a film.’ Then she would never let me film again.” (Nancy’s Pelosi’s office declined to comment for this article.) Alexandra was simply around a lot, often with her sons in tow, and often with her iPhone set to record. And though she thinks some of her mother’s aides may have “a Voodoo doll with my face on it,” she did get some of them to talk on camera.(Of course, they didn’t go off-message:“She’s a heat-seeking missile on votes,” one Nancy Pelosi staffer says of his boss.)
She insists that she’s “not in the Nancy Pelosi propaganda game.” Alexandra, the youngest of Pelosi’s five children, predicts that her family will bea tough audience. A screening was planned for Monday night at the National Archives. The Pelosi siblings were scheduled to attend, but the filmmaker planned it specifically to conflict with her mother’s congressional obligations.“My sisters will probably say, ‘Why did you put that in?’ My mother will probably say, ‘Why did you put that in?’” She is half-hoping her mother never gets around to watching the movie though suspects she will eventually, and “I don’t look forward to her critique of it,” she told The Post. She expects Nancy will be especially sensitive to scenes that involve other Democratic members of Congress. (After publication, The Post learned that Nancy Pelosi did make it to the National Archives screening, after all, and gave a toast at the reception. Alexandra said her mom hasn’t said anything directly to her about the film, but did attempt to fix her daughter’s hair throughout the night.)
And the filmmaker wants to be clear: “I’m not speaking for the Pelosi family. Nobody would want me speaking for the Pelosi family.” (Asked for a response to that statement, older sister Christine Pelosi was diplomatic: From her ex-boyfriends “to her hairstyles to her movies, Alexandra has always been her own unique self,” she wrote.)
One thing the film does not show is Nancy Pelosi expounding at length on her path or her process or the meaning of her historic life. Alexandra said she attempted, at one point, to get her mother to tell her life story. That didn’t go well.
“I’m sure all your colleagues have tried to sit Nancy Pelosi down for an interview and get her to emote or overshare. It’s not who she is,” Alexandra Pelosi told The Washington Post in a Zoom interview from her apartment, after getting the Christmas tree back upright. “The only way to make an honest film about Nancy Pelosi was to make a verité film, because she is her work. So you watch her work. She doesn’t do exposition.”
The film traces the speaker’s origin story back to Baltimore and the tutelage of a father who served as both congressman and mayor. “I learned from my father that it was important to know how to count,” Nancy Pelosi says. Later, she adds, “Some people count sheep at night. I count votes.” Those vote-herding skills are on display in her daughter’s footage from 2009, as she led an effort to pass the Affordable Care Act. When a Democratic congressman from Indiana wavers on voting for the bill, Pelosi pulls the most Catholic of all power moves: she calls the priest who’s serving as the president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and gets him to agree to lean on the member. “Thank you, Father,” she says at the end of the call. “I’d love to come to get your blessing.”
The documentaryfeels more personal than ever. Nancy Pelosi likes to tell the story of being asked to run for Congress when 16-year-old Alexandra was her only child still at home.Before agreeing to run,Nancy asked for Alexandra’s blessing. “I said, Mom, get a life,” Pelosi recalled. “What teenage girl doesn’t want their mother out of the house three nights a week?”
Over the course of her political career, Nancy Pelosi, now 82, became an extraordinarily hated figure on the right. Earlier this year, a man entered the family’s San Francisco home searching for her, and attacked Nancy’s husband, Paul Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull. As the family sat by his hospital bed in the intensive care unit, Alexandra wished, at least in that moment, that she could take back her blessing of Nancy’s decision to enter public life years earlier.
“My father looks like Frankenstein, and I’m so angry,” Alexandra recalled. “I say to my mother, ‘If I knew then what I know now, I never would have given you my permission,” the filmmaker told The Post.
It was Paul, she said, who protested. “You can’t undermine her accomplishments,” she remembered her injured father saying. “That’s not fair to her. You have to say, ‘If you came to me in this social media environment, I would never give you my blessing.”
Alexandra said that she hasn’t slept much since her father’s attack and that the threats to her family have only escalated. She suspects those threats will intensify with the release of this movie. But that didn’t make her want to pull the plug on a film that she hopes will reveal something about the sausage-making nature of the legislative process and her mother’s ability to navigate that process “backwards, in high heels.”
Alexandra Pelosi doesn’t think her film will entice many people into political life. But it might reveal what it takes to survive it. “In the end,” she said, “you have to be a true believer for this job.”
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