Mitt

Given the filmmaker's unrestricted access to Mitt Romney through both presidential campaigns, Greg Whiteley's Mitt is an unsurprisingly warm portrait. Which isn't to say it isn't full of tensions, when not outright suffering, perceptible through all the upbeat chatter from the candidate and his wife, campaign advisers, the Romney sons and their wives.

The film offers a version of the real Mitt, performative and authentic, charming and awkward, occasionally at the same time.

If the brisk 90-minute film can feel incomplete at times--almost no mention is made of the colorful circus of opponents Romney defeated to gain the 2012 nomination, and running mate Paul Ryan isn't shown until the actual election day--Mitt is less concerned with being a chronicle of recent political events than it is with providing an unguarded profile of a man who rarely let his hair down in public.

Ultimately, in a world that includes curtain-ripping pieces like "Game Change" and "The War Room," Mitt feels perfunctory. It feels requisite more than informative.

Mr. Romney is likable in this depiction. But little in Mitt suggests that he is also electable.

Mitt, Greg Whiteley’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about Mitt Romney’s two presidential campaigns, is always interesting (how could it not be, with the remarkable degree of access the candidate gave the filmmaker?) but never really involving.

The depictions of Romney and his clan are honest and intimate, sure, but honesty and intimacy don’t necessarily produce insight, and Mitt’s mistake is to assume that they do.

Even people with Romney stickers still clinging to their bumpers will fidget through the stultifying middle chunk of director Greg Whiteley’s sympathetically observant but journalistically incurious Mitt, the product of six years of friendly, unfettered access to Romney and his family.