Free Republic

For the past 40 years, the race for the American Presidency has begun in the state of Iowa, where Presidential hopefuls spend months traveling the state's 99 counties hoping to win its “first-in-the-nation” vote and prove themselves a viable candidate. In intimate, funny and sometimes emotional detail, CAUCUS tells the story of the 2011-2012 campaign in Iowa as eight Republicans fight to become their party’s standard-bearer and take on Barack Obama. But to win, each must first navigate state fairs, town hall meetings in pizza halls and agitated questions from the increasingly contentious GOP base. CAUCUS is a revealing look...

I suppose the danger of AJ Schnack’s immensely entertaining documentary “Caucus” is that it retells all the hair-raising twists and turns of the 2012 Republican caucus in Iowa as human drama, with the things we’re supposed to care about – the ideology, the “politics” – stripped away. We know for sure that none of these clowns will ever be elected president, so we’re free to view them as flawed, interesting, crazy and sometimes even sympathetic characters in a larger narrative that’s beyond their control. I would argue, in fact, that this gripping and grotesque portrait of retail politics in the...