“The thing that scares me the most is that you’ll come out and that message will be lost,” says son Craig. “People will either think it’s too good to be true, or … it’s just a kind of facade, but I feel like if people really get to know who you are, it could be a successful campaign.”

That too good to be true says it all. Most critics have deservedly praised this well-made little feature, and many have suggested that it succeeds where Romney’s campaigns failed: It shows Mitt to be a lovely, likable, sweet-natured, good-humored man. In his way of walking with mincing steps and his penchant for tidying up after others, he is endearing. He is clearly beloved. His face is capable of only one or two broad expressions, but they are smile and laughter. And while no family as savvy as the Romneys would ever have an unguarded moment with a camera crew in plain sight—Mitt’s notorious “47 percent” speech was before a hidden one—I’m willing to accept that there is not a starkly different man or family behind these scenes. The Romneys are a wholesome and pretty family, and don’t they know it.

But what is missing from this picture? Granted, Mitt is a busy man, but nowhere in any shot in the hour-and-a-half long film is he ever seen reading a book, a magazine, a newspaper, a Kindle, an iPad … anything. We see him once tapping away on a laptop, seemingly answering an email, and we see him once reading from some papers, apparently working up a speech, but nowhere in any shot, not on a side table or on a shelf in the background, or on the floor of the plane beside his reclining chair, nowhere is a page of reading material. You would think that somewhere over six years of filming, on a plane or a bus or in a hotel room, no matter how austere, there might be some trace of a life of the mind. There isn’t. And in a film devoted to showing us the real Mitt Romney, I find it hard to believe that any scene displaying intellectual depth would have been left out.

And it’s not just the physical traces that are absent. Nowhere in any of the family conversations presented over all those years of recording, in all those hotel suites and backstage lounges, on planes and in vehicles, other than brief banter about how much Mitt liked the Coen Brothers’ comedy O Brother Where Art Thou, is there dialogue about anything other than the immediate challenges of the campaign. This is one focused family. There is no talk of history, of world affairs, of military issues, of race, of science, of the fine arts, of sports, of television, of music … nothing. The dialogue is as barren and bland as the hotel-room furnishings.

The film does show us one issue that Mitt feels passionate about: the tax burden on small business. He remembers back when he was running Bain Capital, his private equity and venture capital firm, staying up nights worrying about companies that they couldn’t save, and he seems to have real empathy for how hard it is to create and sustain a small business. But the rest is all tactics and strategy. It’s about how he looks and presents himself, about debate strategy, whether he should be attacking the president or making nice, about the impossibility of pleasing his critics. It’s decent nuts-and-bolts stuff about the theatrics of politicking, but there’s nothing anywhere to suggest any more depth to the man than a campaign poster. There’s certainly nothing in it that would make me want to seat Mitt in the nation’s highest office.