Despite the presence of some Occupy agitators, nobody shouts "This is what democracy looks like!" in the irresistible politicians-meet-the-people documentary Caucus, probably because to do so would be to risk inviting despair. AJ Schnack's film follows one of the great humiliations of American life: the slow, soiling ritual of presidential hopefuls pressing the flesh in preparation for the Iowa Caucus — and often discovering that much of that flesh has already been pressed, persuasively, by some other candidate the week before. ...

 

The film's subject, the 2012 Republican presidential caucus, determines the form: This is a gently dispirited farce, a spectacle of also-rans and why-did-they-runs desperate to prove their fealty to every qualm and misapprehension of one small slice of an already homogenous population. Bachmann talks up that wall because, 1,000 miles from the border, illegal immigration from Mexico is something Iowans continually drill the candidates about. "Our enemies" are "sneaking across the border," grumbles an old man at a Godfather's Pizza, just after bragging to Santorum about saving Medicare money by having sent back an apparatus to help with his sleep apnea.