The Reeler

This is about as innocuous as strategy gets for Goni's campaign, which battled the dual stigmas of an aloof candidate beholden to American interests (asking Bolivians' input on controversial matters like natural gas exports would be "like using a blunt knife to perform surgery," Goni says at one point). Boynton features fascinating conference calls and meetings brainstorming the structure of negative ads and press manipulations. Uber-consultant James Carville (left) drops in long enough to brandish his oracular, lethally charismatic insights, while brief visits to other campaigns reveal competitors far more attuned to their country's indigenous majority.

Rosner acknowledges his firm's ethos pusuing "progressive politics and foreign policy for profit," but also yields to a genuine astonishment about "traditions that democracy can't deal with." You know--like Bolivia's. The paradox here seems fairly obvious to me, and considering its consequences in Bolivia (which, like Marshall Curry's similarly themed Street Fight, are more black-and-white than you want to think and really must be seen to believed), I was surprised to hear Boynton stay on her own message about an overall commitment to objectivity.

"I think the film should speak for itself," she told me. "I don't think I whitewashed (the consultants) in the movie. I don't think I made them out to be saints. I was not trying to turn them into devils or saints. Personaly, yeah, I liked them, and I have a lot of respect for them. The consultants are choosing to tackle a job where the results of their job has an effect on the history of the world. It's a big deal. This is not a Mickey Mouse game. The stakes, as Jeremy said in the film, are very high and very serious. It takes a very brave person to recognize their mistakes and to still go forward in life and tackle a job where you can fundamentally alter the course of the future. And if they do their job well, they can have a very serious effect on how the history of a country unfolds. I respect him for trying to do something important and big. But I also think--and they think--that with this comes a serious responsibility to recognize what your assumptions are and to see what you're doing with warts and all."

Although the obvious implication there is for viewers to judge for themselves, my more instinctive sense was that Boynton is overcompensating for how repellent her subjects are. (It is a personal judgment, granted, but it only made the film that much more compulsively watchable.) As such, that is when I carelessly segued off into lines of inquiry that dwelled too much on Crisis's climax and epilogue, leaving me stranded here at what I guess is now the end of a review. And, to be honest, you should judge for yourself, because Boynton's near-flawless narrative pace and freakish access offer plenty to consider and just the right amount of time to consider it.

Seeing as I am sure we'll be discussing Crisis plenty more of the end of the year, maybe we can open up those spoilers and have another, more thorough go of it then. "Fun" might be not be the right word for it, but I could go for "necessary."