Becoming, review: Michelle Obama’s Netflix documentary gives emotion without intimacy

Michelle Obama’s new Netflix documentary Becoming is the televisual equivalent of a motivational slogan T-shirt that says something like “It’s cool to be kind” or “You got this, girl”. In it, we follow the former first lady as she travels around the US on the 34-stop book tour for her globally bestselling memoir of the same name. Combining footage from on stage and off it, the film tells us her story. She recalls what it was like growing up in the south side of Chicago with a dad dying of MS; how she told the White House butlers to take off their tuxedos and stop tidying her kids’ rooms so that Malia and Sasha might grow up knowing how to put on a bedsheet; the school guidance counsellor who told her she wasn’t “Princeton material”, to which she now smiles: “I went back to the school recently and the principal was like, ‘She doesn’t work here anymore’.”

Becoming was made through the Obama’s own production company, Higher Ground, so unsurprisingly it feels a bit like an inspirational infomercial, bordering on hagiography. Though interesting topics are touched upon – marriage counselling, postnatal depression, her mum’s favouritism of her brother – rarely are these topics pursued in enough detail to become insightful. For instance, the film mentions the time during Barack Obama’s campaign trail when a fist bump between him and his wife was branded the “terrorist fist jab“ by the right-wing press. Attempting satire, the New Yorker magazine published a cartoon of the couple depicted as jihadis. Few got the joke and more fuel was added to the conspiracy that Michelle Obama hated America and was in cahoots with Iraq. Of this experience, Michelle Obama says in Becoming: “They went after me like they went after candidates. It blindsided me.” What she says is true and unfair, but I want to know what she did on those nights she was called a terrorist? Did she cry? What did her staff say? Was she annoyed at her husband for taking on a job that made her life so stressful?

But what Becoming lacks in intimacy, it makes up for in emotional outpouring. One fan is so overwhelmed upon meeting Obama that she can barely breathe. “Don’t make me cry,” jokes the former first lady, squeezing the woman’s hand the whole time. “I just got this face done.” The congregation of a church sits with Obama and one very elderly woman talks about the experience of seeing Barack’s inauguration: “I never thought I would see that. For that I thank you.”

The best scenes are those in which Obama visits community colleges and talks to students about seizing their dreams. One girl, a Mexican-American called Elizabeth, admits she doesn’t understand why her teachers picked her to sit in on the session. She doesn’t spend that long revising because she has to go home and help her dad who had an accident. The only after-school club she goes to is the Latino one and she’s not even the president of that because she has a job to get to most evenings. “And she wonders why she’s here,” Obama smiles, ready to spread some fairy dust. “That story – all the highs and lows and what seems so ordinary and seems like nothing to you – is your power”. All at once, I’m covered in goosebumps. With a bit of work, the Obama business machine could condense those words and put them on a T-shirt. Thousands would buy it.