Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The lingering image of November 29, 2016, three weeks into the fever dream of “President-elect Donald Trump,” is a dim news photo two-shot: on the left, Trump himself, leering like an orange Cheshire Cat over a meal at Manhattan’s Jean Georges. On the right, Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and a two-time presidential contender, his eyebrows raised in a worried arch, his smile pained.
Even if you didn’t know he was mere months removed from a principled, pre-election speech calling Trump “a phony, a fraud,” who was “playing the members of the American public for suckers,” the humiliation is thicker than the butter on his sautéed frog legs. You can almost hear the record scratching, the frame freezing, the narrator’s voice: Yup, that’s me, Mitt Romney. You’re probably wondering how I got into this mess.
Some of those answers are in Mitt the Netflix documentary released in the wake of Romney’s failed 2012 presidential run.
Mitt is a humanizing, soft-focus piece of work, one that depicts its subject as its hero: smart and responsible, a tireless worker, and the patriarch of a family he appears to truly love. The film is light on politics and heavy on sacrifice, steadiness and dignity, a word Romney keeps coming back to as one national campaign fades into another. There are no 3 a.m. tweets or brags about pussy-grabbing: just five years removed, it’s a vision of political nostalgia.
Past the veneer of sober service, Mitt takes careful pains to show Romney at his most relatable. After an election night cold-open, the film flashes back to 2006, with Romney out in the snow, sledding and romping with his family: see, Mitt’s fun!, Mitt wants us to know before he puts on his khakis and button-down shirts. And it gives him the chance to undercut his voluminous, unmentioned wealth.
“We gave you new gloves last year so you don’t have to wear the duct-taped ones,” a relative tells him.
“I know, but these things work great,” he says, holding his hands up.
His 2012 gaffe, a private speech about the 47% of Americans who he claimed see themselves as “victims,” is addressed, but that’s not the politician the film reveals. Instead, in its handful of closed-door policy moments, he talks about small business taxes and the personal struggles of his time at Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made him rich with business strategies Rolling Stone once compared to Gordon Gekko’s.
“I agonized over that,” he remembers of one company that kept him up at night.
If the film goes easy on Romney, it’s close enough to him to feel honest. After watching his family endure two campaigns and come a few million votes shy of the presidency, there’s a deep sense of who they’re fighting for, without litigating exactly what. By the movie’s end, you’re rooting along with them, for a long-suffering ballplayer who keeps coming up short of a title. The big twist in Mitt comes halfway through the movie, when the videographers get new gear and the film suddenly pops into dazzling clarity. But there are no shocking revelations. Romney comes across as a dedicated guy who has a different view about America’s future than his rivals: first Republican Senator John McCain, in 2008, then President Barack Obama. It’s not balanced, or maybe even accurate, but it is sincere.
It comes with a climax: “My time on the stage is over, guys,” Romney says on election night 2012, his concession speech in his hands.
But it’s impossible to watch Mitt now without knowing its epilogue, where its leading man steps into the Trump clown car and gets spat back out.
The scene that’s missing from Mitt is his encounter with a celebrity businessman named Donald Trump: in 2012, as Trump publicly considered his own presidential run on the giddy wave of his Obama birther conspiracy, he endorsed Romney instead. It didn’t shake up the race, but Romney’s acceptance implied an endorsement and credibility of its own.
Why Romney would be interested in an endorsement from Trump, who at this point was already deep into birtherism, is an unflattering thing to consider; that calculus is missing from Mitt. But the equation lingers, and perhaps Romney’s dramatic stand against Trump in his 2016 speech sprang from regret. But he could’ve done more than speak.
After watching Mitt you can sense his family holding him back. As his wife, Ann, puts it on election night: “We’re done.” It’s the bookend to one of the film’s early scenes, a sit-down with the Romneys and their children and in-laws about entering the 2008 campaign. It’s clear what he wants to do, but he won’t do it without them.
But Secretary of State, the job Trump dangled at Jean Georges, was a shortcut: no campaign to slog through, no election night. And, finally, the chance to serve. All he had to do was come to dinner and eat his words.
“Our principles endure,” he says after his 2012 defeat in Mitt That was true once. But who knows now, in this brave new world? In this documentary, Romney controls his destiny: he goes out with dignity. It is a relief to remember him that way.
David Greenwald is the Oregonian music critic and the owner of a Bernie Sanders action figure. Follow him at @davidegreenwald and davidgreenwald.com.
