It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to get a clear assessment on the life of Hillary Clinton. Her status as one of America’s most visible political figures has been so polarizing, her controversies so tirelessly hashed out, her “likability” so exhaustingly assessed, that there doesn’t seem to be much room for another reframing. But Hillary, the four-hour docu-series on Hulu, seeks to take a cool-headed look at her life and career, to revisit past scandals with candor and unpack her divisive persona with unprecedented access to Clinton and those close to her. As first lady, senator from New York, secretary of state and the first female presidential candidate for a major party, Clinton has been revered and reviled, decried as too radical and not radical enough, heralded as a feminist trailblazer and loathed as an emblem of the Democratic establishment.

Hulu’s Hillary takes Clinton’s status as something of a political Rorschach test as its fundamental question. “The thing that was most interesting to me, and the thesis of this, is the fact that she’s so polarizing,” director Nanette Burstein told the Guardian. “Why is that? Who is the real person within that?”

Working with Clinton’s personal archives and dozens of hours of interviews with friends, colleagues (Barack Obama makes a brief appearance), staff and family, including husband Bill and daughter Chelsea, Burstein works to unpack the hardened public persona. Over four episodes, the series traces the arc of Clinton’s life, from bookish daughter of a midwestern Republican family to burgeoning feminist at Wellesley, where her defiant valedictorian speech in 1969 earned her a Life magazine write-up; her time staffing the Nixon impeachment team and at Yale Law; her early romance with Bill and decision to follow her heart to Arkansas; the Clintons’ team surge to the Arkansas governorship and the White House, where Hillary spearheaded healthcare reform that was ultimately doomed, in part, by her husband’s scandals and the public’s distrust of a hard-charging first lady.

Post-2016 Clinton has no need to reframe these events into a protective campaign pitch, said Burstein: “This was a unique time when she wasn’t in public office and she had no plans to be. She had the ability to speak in a way that she wasn’t as nervous about.”

Burstein delineates the chapters of Clinton’s biography with a second thread following her 2016 run for president, with new behind-the-scenes footage shot by her campaign – a first-person view into the dual-edged responses to Clinton’s inscrutable, crouched pragmatism and the work of campaigning as a woman (Clinton estimates she spent 25 whole days in hair and makeup). The two threads inform each other: the 2016 race, in which a debunked scandal (the emails!) nevertheless confirmed people’s worst suspicions of her duplicity, recall past media frenzies.

Clinton’s past of eliciting a media smackdown for rare moments of candor – such as when she quipped “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession,” during Bill’s first presidential campaign – clearly mold Clinton’s famously deep skepticism of the press.

The series reviews some of the landmines of the Clinton story – Whitewater, impeachment, Clinton’s decision to stay in her marriage, the Benghazi hearings. Burstein prepared subjects for difficult questions ahead of time, but, she said, tried to remain as objective as possible. “Especially because there’s so many different scandals and accusations that you have to unpack, I really tried to see every point of view and make sure that I got it right,” she said. “I knew that my idea of getting it right would never be everyone else’s, and that would just be the reality, when you have someone who is incredibly polarizing.”

Clinton with Barack Obama. Photograph: Hulu

Still, as with many biographical documentaries made in cooperation with famous people, the narrative is primarily filtered through the subject’s recollection and retelling. Which is to say: what is said is less revealing than how it’s said, and what is left out. Clinton explains mistakes in terms of hindsight and the tenor of criticism they received (“Were there parts of it that should’ve been revisited and had unintended consequences? Absolutely, there were,” Clinton said of the 1994 crime bill whose mandatory minimums flooded prison with non-violent, largely black and brown offenders, “…so there’s criticism, and I understand that”).

She revises “I was too quick to be defensive,” on her response to the early 90s Whitewater scandal, to “I didn’t play the game well enough.” Her face remains unreadable as she describes what she calls a personally devastating moment: Bill admitting his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, whom she doesn’t mention by name. (Bill says he feels terrible her life was unfairly defined by it; he’s also made more headlines of late for attributing the infidelity to “things I did to manage my anxieties for years”). She’s at her most emotional, eyes glazing with near tears, when she recalls Chelsea holding their hands and family together.

In the series, the 2016 primary battle against Bernie Sanders has the nervous energy of an underdog race, taking up almost as much space as her latter race against Trump. Clinton’s contempt for Sanders’s popularity in 2016 carries into her interview. “Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to work with him,” she says in the second episode. “He got nothing done. He was a career politician. He did not work until he was like 41, and then he got elected to something. It was all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”

Clinton with her daughter Chelsea. Photograph: Hulu

Those quotes, which first ran in the Hollywood Reporter after the film premiered at Sundance in January, went viral and “felt very out of context”, said Burstein, “because they weren’t saying this was from the film or this was in the context of 2016”. (Clinton’s interviews were filmed in November 2018).

When Burstein put the film together in 2019, she wasn’t thinking of Sanders as a Democratic frontrunner for 2020, but the quote inevitably made headlines. “It was very fascinating to see how the news cycle works,” said Burstein of the immediate controversy before the series even had a wide release. “In hindsight, I should’ve realized it would get more attention than I thought.”

It’s yet another example of Clinton’s position as a cultural lightning rod, which Burstein attributes at least in part to gender. “She was always pushing those boundaries in a very public way,” she said. And there’s the fact that Clinton renegotiated her image to the tastes of the time; the series reflects on Hillary’s choice to change her last name from Rodham to Clinton after her independence was partly blamed for Bill’s re-election loss as Arkansas governor. “She does this yo-yo in life – she puts herself out there, the brutality starts, she pulls back, and then she goes a step further,” said Burstein.

Ultimately, looking back at Clinton’s life, said Burstein, offers “so much about history and understanding where we are now in the women’s movement and in our divided country.” Revisiting the razor-thin failure of Clinton’s presidential campaign, in which sexism blew open from unconscious bias to full-blown campaign platform, feels especially resonant in the week in which Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 presidential race; the field is, once again, all male.

“Campaigning against Trump, with Russian interference, with what is it like to be a female candidate, the unconscious bias that goes on – all of these things are still completely relevant in our elections,” said Burstein.