Directed by R. J. Cutler and David Van Taylor

Many documentaries are actually propaganda, and that’s okay. The Thin Blue Line, Harlan County, USA, and Bowling for Columbine wore their agenda on their sleeves. Salesman, in my opinion one of the best documentaries ever made, not so much. We travel along with these Bible salesmen and simply watch—with pity, anger, and frustration—whatever you the audience bring to the table.

A Perfect Candidate is like that. The documentary filmmakers wanted to chronicle the campaign of Oliver North to take the U.S. Senate seat then held by Chuck Robb. I voted in that election. It was 1994, and the state was Virginia, where I live. I was a committed Democrat and voted for Robb. There was no way I would vote for the Iran-Contra bagman, and many people who were not Democrats felt the same way. Robb won.

Not that Robb didn’t have his problems. In the days before Clinton (but after Gary Hart), Chuck Robb was revealed to have dallied with a former Miss Virginia. No sex, mind you—just a naked backrub in a hotel room, or so Robb claimed. And here is where the power of the film medium shows itself. When Lynda Robb defends her husband in a press conference, the words are supportive, but the teeth are clenched, the eyes distant. Wife Robb’s body language practically begs you to condemn her husband. I’ve never seen an indictment so plain.

Other indictments of Robb—he visits a small town and doesn’t know what a laundromat is. He sits in on Sunday service in a Black church, swaying completely out of rhythm with the raucous praise song. Then the preacher endorses him, not by calling Robb an effective senator or a friend to African Americans in Virginia, but by reminding his flock they need to vote for him because “those of you looking for a perfect candidate won’t find one.” Ouch.

On the Republican side, directors Cutler and Taylor found their focus in Mark Goodin, North’s campaign strategist. Smart, cool, and level-headed, Goodin seemed to see something in North people wanted. Cutler produced the brilliant documentary The War Room, which chronicled Bill Clinton’s primary upset. That film homed in not on Clinton, but on the dynamic duo of James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. So Cutler and his co-director know that personalities carry the story, and Goodin is a good proxy for the bland North. They also follow a Washington Post reporter embedded with the North campaign, and we see his slow, grudging acceptance of North as a real candidate. An amusing exchange: a North supporter asks him which paper he represents. When the reporter says it’s the Post, the Republican jumps back as if he’s toxic.

That North supporter was a Korean American, and so an unexpected question emerged when I watched A Perfect Candidate. Was the Democratic Party really the party for racial minorities, as I believed? Robb played to the stereotype of a rich, white aristocrat, taking the lukewarm endorsement of Blacks while swaying arrhythmically to their music. North was courting a group of Asian Americans. At one point, he stuns a young Black student who asks him if he supports the Confederate flag. “I do not,” he says. Silence. That was not the answer she expected.

Not that North and Republicans get off clean. A patrician Republican dowager defends the Confederate flag, calling out “the minority races” who “bring racism into everything.” The press picks apart his answer about the Confederate flag, and his convictions for lying to Congress dog him at every step. In fact, the film opens with a news montage about the Iran-Contra affair. A Perfect Candidate was set up to expose the farce that was Oliver North.

But then, Cutler and Taylor found the film within the film. North lied (with justification, his supporters say). But Robb was no paragon of virtue either. There was no perfect candidate. And I started to wonder if there was even a perfect party, as I had assumed. I did not regret my vote for Robb over North, but when I left A Perfect Candidate, I wondered if I was actually a Democrat. I believed myself to be politically astute and learned. But like most people I voted based mostly on assumptions. Making me question my political loyalties was surely not the film’s intention. Its aim was just to show the truth. That it did.

A Perfect Candidate played in a very limited number of theaters, most of them probably in Richmond, which is where I saw the movie. It is available to watch on YouTube here.