Only sometimes political in the past, art and its artists are everyday more visibly politicized on today’s stage. Actors and athletes are now features at all stripe of rallies and demonstrations, though why their endorsements here are of any greater weight than in ads for shoes, cosmetics and cell phones is a mystery. The answer may lie in the three-ring media atmosphere surrounding our cowboy and campaign trails, that unique American bed shared by the entertainment and electoral industries in a coupling that so bemuses Europeans.

Is there a danger that art may go one additional step and become nothing more than a sociopolitical essay to flog a particular viewpoint? Yes, and a good example would be Alexandra Pelosi’s Journeys with George, her "autofocus Sony MiniDV camcorder . . . home movie" of traveling as a member of the 2000 press corps that accompanied candidate George W. Bush.

Daughter and granddaughter of Democratic Members of Congress and a former TV producer ("Dateline"), the then twenty-nine-year-old filmmaker is apparently herself a piece of work and difficult interviewee. What remains uncut from her seventy-odd hours of footage is not remotely the hoped-for picture of repackaging a candidate but, rather, a journalistic ego trip that exposes those covering events – Ms. Pelosi foremost – more than those covered. Such can hardly be surprising, when media routinely celebrates its self-celebrity while shortchanging news.

Though the documentary genre is tagged "non-fiction," re-creations and selection of facts and talkers – who is that? – often produce a bias in one direction or another. Journeys with George is organized by chronology, not progression, and everyone appears buffoonish; but then, who doesn’t in reflections on the backs of spoons? Where, exactly, is the relevance of "Dubya’s" partiality for fried junk food, talking while eating or having baloney-and-cheese-on-white served in-flight? Shaky close-ups of turkey-on-rolls, stubbly chins, blemishes and liver spots, red noses, the filmmaker’s new bobbed do and hair in sinks draw easy chuckles but lead nowhere.

The film is, amazingly, unconcerned with issues. Whether viewers are apolitical, Democrat or Republican, Red or Green, liberal, conservative or romantic/cynic Mark Twainian ("there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress") – all will find laughs and gaffes at the expense of these politicians and weary press people, voters and observers, faces out of Grant Wood and tots and Texans. Bush comes across as stiff, clumsy, a poor speaker and uneasy with popular culture, but he does deserve marks for being game. "Unplugged," says one ad – "unzippered," "with pants down," might be better, though the only mooner is an androgynous railroad-track protester or prankster – but in the end such familiar proximity makes saint and sinner alike look awfully silly, savant and fool indistinguishable in the daily steam bath.

The Dallas Morning News’s Wayne Slater emerges as journalistic butt for his "fifteen minutes of fame" – that flap over the DUI arrest – and this whole effort is Pelosi’s ninety minutes of limelight. "The reporter," says one, "has become . . . the story; and that shouldn’t happen." If she and the others were not bedazzled by proximity to power, not preening for celebrity consumption – " my network got the highest rating" – or tired beyond caring, the result should have been a mordant commentary on the extravaganza by which men come to office in America. In the hands of England’s eighteenth-century essayists, or of Mad Magazine or the early Orson Welles, what a story this might have been.

Here, however, objectivity is nonexistent, for recorder and recorded are so caught up in the show that irony lies, not in what is seen, but only in the wishful eye of the beholder. In quick interviews and schoolgirlish voice-overs, there is broad humor but no redeeming good humor, no hint of an alternative. Pelosi hurriedly, half-heartedly asks Bush a couple of throwaway questions, the answers to which he throws away.

Bows to social concerns are awkwardly misplaced, as when someone points to a childish campaign drawing depicting a black child, notes that there are no blacks at the rally but then leaves it dangling with the admission that there are no New Hampshirites "of color," anyway. Equal billing goes to the filmmaker’s incipient attraction to a brash young journalist – alas! he already has a girl – as to Bush’s smoothing over her falling out with her compeers, to her chocolate birthday cake, squirrels nibbling doughnuts, unnecessary one-time subtitles (engine noise frequently drowns out voices), and the candidate’s modeling lesson on cowboy-style attire.

The only performer who achieves any distance, and therefore sees clearly and wholly, is soft-spoken British journalist Richard Wolffe (in whose country royalty is the target of even more tasteless tabloid scandalmongering). "Americans," he remarks, "don’t know the real issues. It’s a joke . . . about celebrity. We can pretend that it’s serious." No one else, certainly not anyone making this film, sees the woods for the cheerleader circus to which all are so busily contributing. Look, Ma! I’m on-screen!

(Released by Purple Monkey Productions; not rated by MPAA.)