Director Lesley Chilcott’s three-part Netflix series Arnold has a subject so famous and ubiquitous that a first name is all the title requires. Arnold Schwarzenegger has lived an epic life, carving out his mythic existence with success in multiple arenas. In this series his biography is presented strictly by-the-numbers in a creatively unambitious documentary about this epically ambitious man.
Schwarzenegger, 75, recounts his life on camera, with each episode spotlighting a specific segment of his career: “Athlete,” “Actor,” and “American.” Interspersed with interviews with his co-workers and friends, including James Cameron and Danny DeVito, the Schwarzenegger-sanctioned doc is light on controversy, and annoyingly stagey unnecessary reenactments of incidents from his life occasionally appear.
Episode one, “Athlete,” establishes that every stage of Schwarzenegger’s life was marked by a superhuman drive to be number one. He grew up in the tiny Austrian village of Thal with a father who was an abusive World War II vet on the German side—a martinet who instilled in Arnold and his brother, Meinhard, a fiercely competitive urge. While other Austrians focused on soccer or skiing, the adolescent Arnold became fascinated by bodybuilding after seeing muscleman Reg Park in a Hercules movie.
The rest is history. Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Universe competition by age 20, before he reached the United States. And when he did arrive in the States, he lived the supreme Horatio Alger success story: a muscle-bound kid with a heavy accent and an unpronounceable name taking America by storm.
Nicknamed The Austrian Oak, Schwarzenegger became a poster boy for muscle training with the help of weightlifting legend Joe Weider, winning title after title. After a decade of competing, it became “boring,” Schwarzenegger explains, and he chose to “leave it a winner.” But not before he filmed the 1977 hit docudrama Pumping Iron, which widely popularized massive delts and pecs throughout America.
In “Actor,” Schwarzenegger discusses his movie career, and from here on, the material becomes overly familiar. Star-making vehicles like Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator made him a box-office draw as one of the world’s biggest action stars. One of Arnold’s most amusing vignettes is an interview with Sylvester Stallone describing his relentless competition with Schwarzenegger in the ’80s, each of them vying for the biggest guns and most kills on screen. This echoes a telling phrase Schwarzenegger uses to describe what he loves about America’s hyper-ambitious culture: “Too big is not enough!”
Episode three covers Schwarzenegger’s marriage to Maria Shriver, a Kennedy, and his entrance into politics. After serving two terms as governor of California, Arnie’s marriage collapsed when it was revealed that he had fathered a child with the famous couple’s housekeeper. This, and some admissions of sexual harassment in his youth, are virtually the only aspersions allowed to be cast on his character throughout the series.
Therein lies the documentary’s major flaw: Arnold is essentially a promotional video for its subject, who is presented as godlike. Admittedly, Schwarzenegger’s extraordinary life makes most of it engaging, but it’s too worshipful. The bigger problem is that this is unexceptional, and low on insight or enlightening new information about the “Governator.” It’s basically fun, but for a documentary about Olympian bodies, its storytelling muscles lack tone.
Arnold
NR, three episodes
Streaming (Netflix)
