He’s not one for sitting on fences, and the documentary GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA is an unashamedly opinionated film about a shamelessly honest man and brilliant commentator.

Nicholas Wrathall’s admiring portrait of Vidal, who died in 2012 at 86, is a great introduction to his opinions for anyone wanting to know more, as well as a brilliant watch for fans (of which there are many).

He’s not one for sitting on fences, and the documentary GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA is an unashamedly opinionated film about a shamelessly honest man and brilliant commentator.

Nicholas Wrathall’s admiring portrait of Vidal, who died in 2012 at 86, is a great introduction to his opinions for anyone wanting to know more, as well as a brilliant watch for fans (of which there are many).

In Gore Vidal's America, the nightmare scenario political coup by the bad guys has already happened. The right have triumphed and the human values of the liberals have been hopelessly consigned to history. As the film begins we all watch on helplessly as Vidal's cutting, opinionated and informed approach rips away at the facade of the “new” America and leaves you crying out for more. It uses interviews and historical footage of his more famous appearances on television and talk shows over the last fifty or so years to examine the progress by which the US reached its current state, and in the most recent footage we see him draw dramatic conclusions on the fate of the nation as it stands. Plenty of pessimism all round, but so elegantly and acerbically presented that it is extremely watchable as well.

Vidal has been called “the last lion of the age of American liberalism”, and Wrathall’s great portrait looks at the man through his own words as well as the words of those who knew him best. This includes his actor and director nephew Burr Steers and the late Christopher Hitchens, an English author, literary critic and journalist who spent much of his career in the United States, and even became an American citizen.

I was a bit disappointed that the documentary only glosses his private life, which was at times a political statement in itself. Vidal’s radical theories about sexuality, which earned him a fan letter from the legendary Dr. Alfred Kinsey, are only mentioned briefly. The astonishing success of his comic transgender novel, “Myra Breckinridge” - which landed him on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Look and Life magazines, no less - is only briefly touched upon. Described at the time by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s," the book's major themes are things like feminism, transsexuality, American expressions of machismo and patriarchy, and deviant sexual practices, as filtered through an insanely camp sensibility. If you haven’t read it then I highly recommend that you do – it’s brilliant!

Vidal’s gloomy and pessimistic take on American history and politics is at the heart of the film, and his call on various prominent politicians is acutely devastating. In Vidal’s eyes John F. Kennedy was charming and an inspiring speaker but a poor leader who dragged us into Vietnam; Ronald Reagan was “the best cue card reader they could find” and George W. Bush was a “fool” (no arguing there). On American involvement in the Middle East, he said: “What we’ve done is unite the Muslim world. We’ve made a lot of trouble for ourselves. This is only the beginning, and we will wish we had not done it.”

Even if you’re not a fan, you cannot fault the sheer wit and elegance of this brilliant truth teller, who upon being asked what he thought his legacy might be, said quite honestly, “I couldn’t care less.”

Public discourse is now louder, angrier and coarser, but is it as affecting? RIP Gore Vidal.

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