One Bright Shining Moment

Lively documentary about McGovern's disastrous run for the US presidency. The interviews with him are worth the price of admission.

A lively, long, intelligent documentary.

Running just a little over two hours and wordily narrated by talk-radio host Amy Goodman, Stephen Vittoria's hagiography spends more time bemoaning the past 30 years of U.S. political history and setting the dismal tone for McGovern's arrival on the political scene than it does on his 1972 campaign.

"Too decent to be president" was the label stuck to former senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, the self-effacing subject of Stephen Vittoria's One Bright Shining Moment. If "decent" means "polite," then the movie makes no effort to emulate its subject.

Instructive but aggressively biased liberal history lesson.

Still, as the documentary plods past the two-hour mark, much of Mr. McGovern's legend seems dependent on Nixon's faults, and even the Democrat's political supporters, with hindsight's many gifts, can't infuse his persona with any more dynamism.

Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization.