In ‘Fauci,’ a big-screen portrait of a pandemic superstar
John Hoffman and Janet Tobias’ “Fauci” is the first big-screen documentary of the nation’s top infectious disease expert and ubiquitous face of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s an intimate portrait of a longtime public servant whose notoriety has risen dramatically — and with that, brought heaps of far-right scorn on the veteran of seven White House administrations.
The film opens in a split screen, with Fauci, who grew up above his family’s Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, pharmacy, walking to his office at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 40 years ago on one side, and him making the same trip recently on the other. Audio and video clips, meanwhile, play of Fauci’s contemporary detractors. One television news pundit calls for his head on a pike.
“I often use the analog of the Roman forum. There were people throwing roses at him and then throwing garbage,” says Tobias in an interview alongside Hoffman. “We really wanted people to get a sense of what that was like nationally but also what it was like for a human being. It’s very sobering to his wife and daughters deal with the level of threats to him and to themselves.”