Mitt Romney in Mitt (Adam Ridley)

Get ready to like Mitt Romney. The new documentary Mitt may make some of us regret how easily we dismissed him during the 2008 and, especially, the 2012 presidential campaigns. It’s a somewhat bitter catch-22, as it couldn’t have been released during his active political career since that’s what the film portrays. But had it been, it seems like he would have avoided such a landslide loss to Obama, though he may not have actually won. That’s what makes the film fascinating—it’s riddled with the ironies and contradictions that shape all of our lives, but played out on a national scale.

It becomes clear the main failure of Romney’s political career was in communication. For example, during his days as governor of Massachusetts, he was criticized as being out of touch with the average realities of life for having an elevator installed in the governor’s mansion. The reality, according to Mitt, is that, as one of his sons says while letting out some frustration, he “put it in for his wife’s MS condition, a-holes!” We also learn that the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? is his favorite film, and he’s seen it countless times. After following both of his presidential campaigns, I imagined his favorite film was the Seymour Hicks 1935 version of A Christmas Carol or something similar. He even outright admits this weakness of his before a big debate— if he has a solid relevant fact in his pocket, he can use it to score points against his opponent, but if it’s a matter of just “out-verbalizing” someone, he has no chance. But why would someone who has no taste for rhetoric engage repeatedly in the most heavily rhetorical process in the world?

The film almost entirely takes place in large hotel rooms where the extensive Romney family go over that day’s campaign travails. There aren’t many mentions of God, faith, providence, or really anything overly serious—their discussions are always candid, humble, and surprisingly humorous. More than anything, it shows the toll that a presidential campaign has on a family. In a number of scenes, the Romney sons, who act as his closest advisors, make it clear that they would almost prefer a loss since they would be able to settle back into their regular lives, while a victory would prolong the chaos of the campaign for several more years at least.

This brings up another of the film’s ironies—why would such a family-focused man take his family through a process they clearly hate, not once but twice? Josh Romney, one of Mitt’s five sons, has a memorable moment where he decries the difficulty of getting good men into positions of power because of all the criticism and general insanity of public life. It’s obvious that they believe strongly in the kind of goodness that their father embodies, and feel obligated to help someone like him become as influential as possible. We also get a better idea of Mitt’s actual political philosophy than we did in the 2012 campaign—another failure of communication. In a quick anecdote about a conversation with John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s Pizza, Schnatter says that if he had wanted to start his business today, the Obama administration’s taxes on small business would have prevented him from doing so. Romney believed that it was up to him to change the tide to one more conducive to small business owners and thought that they would continue getting squeezed out under Obama’s policies, thus weakening the middle class and creating an even greater disparity between the elite and the poor.

Maybe the key moment where the 2012 Romney campaign faltered was the infamous video of him dismissing 47 percent of Americans as lazy freeloaders at a private dinner for wealthy supporters. The media kept hammering him about this, and he never figured out how to recover from being perceived as an elitist lacking empathy for the working class. But again, Mitt shows how this was just a failure of communication and that he has a deep understanding of how lucky he was to be born into a position to succeed. Mitt praises his own father as being “the real deal” while dismissing his own accomplishments as the result of circumstance and luck. His father came over from Mexico and settled in this country with no contacts or advantages and worked his way to become a governor. Mitt acknowledges that that is the really impressive feat while his own career would have been a disappointment if he hadn’t become a governor and presidential candidate.

The Mitt who emerges from Mitt has empathy for those in disadvantaged circumstances, believes in strengthening the middle class, creating opportunity for everyone to succeed, and even has excellent taste in art, while being humble and honest almost to a fault. It’s just too bad that he didn’t know how to make us realize this until it didn’t matter anymore.