‘Prime Minister’ reveals private side of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern

“Prime Minister” — 3 stars

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see. With Ardern’s partner (now husband), TV and radio broadcaster Clarke Gayford, serving not only as the film’s co-producer but also as a cameraman, the film is present at moments deeply private as well as public, including bedroom conversations between the two as they discuss the day’s events and the next day’s plans.

That may sound dull, but when one member of a couple is the head of a country, the darling of the global media and an increasingly embattled figure in the coronavirus wars, it is anything but.

A rising member of New Zealand’s center-left Labour Party, Ardern was elected prime minister in 2017, coming to power in a coalition with the anti-immigration New Zealand First — politics making the usual strange bedfellows. At 37, she was the youngest female head of state in the world, and in June 2018 she became only the second elected head of government to ever give birth while in office (after Benazir Bhutto in 1990). But the qualities that endeared Ardern to the world and — for her first term, at least — to her country were a directness, intelligence, drive and unglamorous charm that “Prime Minister” convincingly presents as entirely unmanufactured.

“I could only be myself,” Ardern says about being thrown into the 2017 race at the last minute after Labour’s candidate, Andrew Little, stepped down. And throughout Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s film, a viewer never gets a sense of image polishing or even the standard political wishy-washiness. On the contrary, “Prime Minister” presents a test case for holding true to one’s beliefs rather than watering them down for public consumption or compromise. In Ardern’s first 100 days as New Zealand’s PM, her government banned offshore drilling, established free first-year university tuition and paid parental leave, and more. “My whole journey in politics has been a battle with two sides of myself,” the ex-prime minister says, “the one that says ‘You can’t’ and the one that says ‘You have to.’”

She also got semiautomatic and assault rifles banned after the 2019 Christchurch shootings that killed 51 people, passed an abortion bill that allowed New Zealand women to seek the procedure without having to feign mental illness, and made a global tour that included highly visible stops at the United Nations and on late-night talk shows. Then came 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic, a battle that Ardern initially and decisively won by locking down New Zealand entirely, dropping new infections to nearly zero and saving an estimated 80,000 lives. That October, Ardern and her party were reelected in a landslide victory.

And there the love affair ended. The second half of “Prime Minister” is a pressure cooker: Ardern mounted a national vaccination program that received a backlash from conspiracy groups similar to and imported from those in America. An angry army camped out on the grounds of Parliament with nooses, Trump signs and posters comparing the PM to Hitler; Ardern and her relatives were doxed and threatened, and the media and public opinion slowly shifted away from her. “How would you describe this past week?” Gayford gently asks her at one point. Ardern answers, “If there is a subterranean space that sits beneath hell, THAT.”

Feeling she was dragging her party and her issues down — and for her own mental well-being — Ardern resigned in 2023, saying she “didn’t have enough in the tank” for a third term. If it arguably wasn’t the right decision for her country, it was the right one for her. “I went for a walk with Clarke,” Ardern says in the film, “and it was GONE. That weight.”

The 2024 segments of “Prime Minister” find Ardern at Harvard Kennedy School as a teaching fellow, preparing her memoirs and taking stock of what she did and didn’t accomplish. Of the pandemic, she insists, “I still would rather be standing in front of the public explaining why perhaps we did too much than explaining why we did too little. Because the difference between too much and too little is people dying.”

The song over the film’s end credits is the ’80s Crowded House chestnut “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” with its lyrics about “a battle ahead,” written by the band’s New Zealand-born leader Neil Finn. This story isn’t close to being finished.

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Unrated, but contains language and protest violence. 101 minutes.