The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner

“I have trouble making decisions and I have trouble talking and thinking things through,” Booth Gardner tells his doctor. “This campaign is killing me.” The doctor nods. Campaigning for Initiative 1000, also known as the Death with Dignity Act, on the ballot in Washington state in 2008, has taken a visible toll on the former governor. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1994, he’s now showing increasing symptoms. The tremors, he says, are keeping him awake at night.

And yet, as Gardner indicates in The Last Campaign Of Governor Booth Gardner, he means to keep on. The short documentary, nominated for an Academy Award last year and premiering this week on HBO2, traces his efforts. In public, Gardner maintains his resolve and wit, as well as the sense of humor that helped to make him such an effective and beloved two-term governor during the 1990s. In private — or at least the pretense of “private” afforded by Daniel Junge’s camera — Gardner admits he’s tired and sometimes worried. “I can feel daily, little things that are different,” he says. “Like I slur a little bit when I talk to you. I’ve had walking problems lately again.” The camera cuts from an interview-style close-up to a shot of Gardner on the sidewalk, his steps awkward.

As in Junge’s Chiefs (a documentary about the difficulties facing members of a high school basketball team from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Washington state), such illustration — brief, deft, and effective – helps you to appreciate a personal struggle. In this case, Gardner’s literal efforts to get through the day complicate his political campaign. “When I’m getting ready to go out of the house, I kid myself,” he says, “‘Is this the day? Is this the day you’re going to be found in the bathroom?’ I don’t want to do that, so I take short showers these days. I just get in and get out of there.” Charismatic and profoundly sympathetic, Gardner underlines that he is not conducting this “last campaign” for his own immediate future, but because he speaks daily with other individuals — constituents — who are suffering, near the end of life, and seek a way to regain control over their own lives. “That gets me a little angry,” he says, “But it makes me believe I’ve got to see this thing through.”

For all Gardner’s resolve and appeal, the film also shows the work of his opposition, beginning with Duane French, head of the Washington chapter of Not Dead Yet. French sees the initiative as a threat to himself and others like him. “My disability is a part of who I am,” he says, “but there were times when I battled significantly with depression. And if assisted suicide had been legal, I probably would have considered it and I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you today.” In making the jump from the language of the initiative (which gives terminal patients, diagnosed as having six months to live, the right to request help from their physicians) to the fear of suicide being offered or even counseled to patients with chronic conditions, suggests the many understandable fears associated with dying.

Rather than detailing any of the arguments for or against the initiative, The Last Campaign shows French and other opponents as they make their cases to various audiences. French speaks to a reporter, who writes down what he says, nodding, not asking a question. Eileen Geller of the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide, sends children to leave flyers against the initiative under doormats (“Never in the mailbox,” she cautions, “That’s against the law”). And Sister Sharon Park of the Washington State Catholic Conference speaks before a group, stating her quarrel with the initiative: “The ultimate in our Catholic teaching,” she says, is that “the decision maker for each individual is their own personal conscience.” That she also means to provide instruction as to that “conscience formation” might seem contradictory, but for Parker, the morality allows no choice or interpretation.

For Gardner, this question of choice has to do with control. “I automatically thought I had control over the rest of my life,” he says at the film’s start. “It never dawned on me that I didn’t have any control. But that’s the fact. And I think that’s wrong.” This dilemma — who has control over what what’s wrong and what’s right, over the determination of “personal conscience” — remains unresolved in the documentary. As Gardner himself is increasingly unable to speak publicly (“I freeze,” he sighs, “My mind shifts off of what I’m saying and I can’t go back”), the campaign he started asks him not to speak (this following a couple of scenes showing listeners shifting uncomfortably in their seats as he gazes off, unable to continue a sentence he’s started). It is, he says, “frustrating not being able to speak, when that’s what you did for a living.”

This is the specter hovering over the film, what Gardner does “for a living,” in multiple senses. While he embodies a sense of loss, he also reveals persistent insight and compassion. Gracious and nuanced as he observes himself, Gardner also imagines the difficulties faced by others who don’t have his resources (he’s an heir to the Weyerhaeuser fortune) or determination to speak out. BY film’s end, the election results in Washington becoming the second state, after Oregon, to grant a so-called “right to die.” Even as the campaign is done, however, the film respects the complexity of the conflict.