Opinion | ‘Gutsy’ gives a fascinating look at Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s mother-daughter relationship

They take a stab at line-dancing. They learn to fold tamales. They go bowling with Wanda Sykes.

It is Hillary Clinton as we have never seen her. Chelsea, too!

Their new Apple TV Plus docuseries “Gutsy” — all set to get a splashy welcome in Toronto during the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend — is a many-flowered thing. Going beyond the headlines, past the talking points, it is a shaggy, meandering, open-ended thing with a 360 view of all the many ways in which courage reveals itself.

As they zip around America and beyond — did I mention they go to clown school in Paris, in one episode? that they hang with Megan Thee Stallion, the rapper, in another? — the eight-parter can also be construed as a series of GIFs just waiting to happen. Hillary packing her own suitcase, for example! Hillary going rafting. The former first lady, senator and Secretary of State donning a full hazmat suit as she meets a beekeeper.

As emotional as “Gutsy” genuinely gets in parts (I teared up watching Hillary talk to the mother of Heather Heyer, the young woman who lost her life in Charlottesville), it shines best in the way it leans into the mother-daughter-ness of it all.

Beautifully shot, the series clearly exists as an epilogue for sorts for Hillary (a capper after her dashed presidential dreams), while simultaneously giving us a whole new introduction to her more Mona Lisa-ish daughter. Nice to meet you. As something of a Chelsea watcher, I found that the most fascinating, I gotta admit.

All a callback, for sure, to the moment she first emerged during her father’s dramatic presidency — when “Chels” was seared into the imagination as a schoolgirl with untamed curls and braces. During those formative years in Washington and later, during stops at Stanford and Oxford, she appeared largely in “wordless pantomime,” as writer Todd Purdum once described it. And yet, whenever her parents needed her — whether as a kind of family glue or media decoy — Chelsea was there.

At times, literally holding her parents together, as the most famous photo from the Clinton era — probably one of the most famous presidential photographs ever taken — shows too well: the first daughter hand in hand in hand with a humbled Bill and a mortified Hillary, following the crescendo of the Monica Lewinsky mess. Chelsea walking between them as they stride towards a helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House.

“If we ever have a daughter, we should name her Chelsea.” That’s how her story actually began, as Hillary self-mythologized in her 2003 memoir “Living History.” The newly married Clintons were in London, England, during Christmas, when they happened upon the Chelsea neighbourhood. Not only that, but while there they heard the song “Chelsea Morning,” the Judy Collins version of the famous Joni Mitchell ditty.

The quirks of her existence began early, as also memorialized. Before their lives would bring them to D.C., Bill was running for re-election in Arkansas when he and his wife sat Chelsea down at the dinner table to have “the talk.” “We explained that in election campaigns, people even tell lies about her father in order to win, and we wanted her to be ready for that,” Hillary matter-of-facted. “Like most parents, we had taught her that it was wrong to lie, and she struggled with that.”

Then they engaged in a bit of role-playing, in which Chelsea pretended to be Bill — wow! — and went on to give a drill about why she/he should be elected. Bill, rising from his chair, pretended to be an opponent. “Bill said terrible things about himself,” Hillary wrote. Chelsea began to cry. Chelsea’s parents acted out the mock attacks on her father over and over again until Chelsea could listen without crying. She was six.

The singular weirdness of Chelsea’s life even followed her to her own nuptials in 2010, a moment that put her in the biggest spotlight she’d seen after years of peek-a-boo. In the weeks leading up to her wedding, to financier Marc Mezvinsky, a “new vocabulary” had emerged — as the Washington Post reported — defining a whole new pecking order. “In the vast concentric circles of Clintonian friendship,” the paper reported, only those in the very know were whispering “I’ll see you after The Wedding.”

The wedding, at which Chelsea donned Vera Wang, had become an extra metaphor for the special interrelationships between the three principals involved. (Chelsea’s husband-to-be, in this manner, seemed to be only a bit character in the spectacle.) Likewise, when Chelsea announced her first pregnancy in 2014, she did so in a very specific way: at a Clinton Foundation forum promoting girls’ empowerment.

For years now, the Chelsea-ness of Chelsea has been wrapped up in the only-ness of being the Only Child. The culture — long permeated with ideas about solo progeny — dubs these children as over-entitled, sometimes aloof. And while there are probably as many types of “Only Children” as there are kids with siblings, it’s hard to dispute the idea that “Onlies” do form unique repositories of their parents’ love (and, at times, baggage). More so perhaps when you are the solo kid of two internationally known personalities.

As Chelsea herself mentions in the new series, not only did she not have siblings, she didn’t even have cousins in her generation. One reason she often seemed like a little adult, and why we never got a rebel phase. Always the Girl Scout.

It was something I detected even watching “Gutsy.” While her mom has spent a lifetime telegraphing practised empathy, she is looser here than ever. Hillary is in her zero f—s phase. Chelsea, though — who has long played the role of cheerleader and enforcer — seems at times more distant. She probably cannot help it. This, after all, is the woman who still carries the scars of being made fun of as a girl — on “Saturday Night Live,” etc. — as she raises in the series when talking with a group of female comics.

Being Chelsea doesn’t actually suck. A job right out of college working at blue chip consulting firm McKinsey & Company came with a starting salary reported at $120,000. According to a profile in Vogue some years back, she sat at the point on the boards of seven organizations, including the School of American Ballet and Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp. We are also talking about somebody who, when she accompanied her mother to Italy as a young thing, had the entire public section of Pompeii closed just for them.

Not that she is a slouch for hard work. While remaining active with her family’s foundation, writing books and taking a more public role with her mother’s presidential campaign, the mother of two also squeezed in a doctorate from Oxford in 2020.

As outsized as her life has been, however, “Gutsy” brings her relationship with her mother back to earth. I mean, there is even one episode in which the two are in a car in Arkansas — a homecoming of sorts — and end up relitigating Hillary’s resistance to Chelsea getting her ears pierced when she was 16. Relatable! And pretty funny. Families are going to family … right?

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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