Mitt

Mitt focuses on a couple of flashpoints: the unsuccessful 2008 primaries against John McCain, the successful 2012 primaries and the 2012 general election. In none of these do we get any “aha, so that’s how he really feels” moments. It’s more a portrait of someone who assesses each situation accurately, good or bad.

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

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.

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.

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

It offers a quiet, empathetic picture from the perspective of Romney and his family of what it’s like for a human being to experience the glare of a modern media campaign and to offer himself up for rejection, twice.

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.

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.