Why Films Showing Presidential Candidates as Regular Guys Are Risky

“I feel like if people really get to know who you are,” Craig Romney says early on in Mitt, a new Netflix documentary about his father’s two presidential bids, “it could be a successful campaign.” Filmmaker Greg Whiteley, who was granted extraordinary access to Mitt Romney and his family over the six years he spent trailing them, shot this scene in 2010, as the Romney clan gathered to decide whether their patriarch should make another run at the White House. Whiteley’s film, which made its debut at Sundance to widespread acclaim, is precisely the rendering of Romney that his son would have wanted the public to see: He comes across as warm, selfless, and human, still awkward, but endearingly so—and also funny. If he drank, you’d have a beer with him. The wooden automaton whom the public met, and ultimately rejected, is nowhere in evidence.

Unfortunately for Romney, Mitt didn’t appear until after he’d lost the election. Although several family members, including his son Tagg, pushed for the film to be released prior to Election Day, Romney’s campaign strategists forbade it. “Their argument was, ‘Look, you’re walking around with a loaded gun. We don’t know what you’re filming,’ ” Whiteley told Time. But having seen the film and the reaction to it, some Romney partisans say this was a mistake and have even begun raising the possibility of a third presidential attempt in 2016. (They’ll first have to convince the candidate. Asked whether he would consider another run, Romney told the New York Times, “Oh no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no.”)