It’s hard to know whether to marvel or weep when James Carville goes into his Bill Clinton–meets–Looney Tunes act in Rachel Boynton’s knockout documentary Our Brand Is Crisis—the context is so morally topsy-turvy. As a high-priced consultant to the 2002 Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”), Carville gives a dazzling demonstration of how a politician should field an “oddball crap question” and steer it, in as few words as possible, back to the campaign’s message, which in this case is, “We’re in a crisis—and I’m the guy with the know-how to fix it.” The problem is that the blinkered patrician Goni doesn’t have the know-how to fix a stopped toilet, much less a country on the verge of economic collapse, with a disenfranchised indigenous majority howling to be recognized.

The process of “framing” Goni to look like something he isn’t could be the stuff of a rambunctious campaign comedy like Primary Colors or, for that matter, the documentary The War Room, which made Carville a political rock star. And parts of Our Brand Is Crisis are darkly amusing. But Boynton has done her own framing: This campaign is a precursor to tragedy. She opens with footage of an anti-government riot that came less than a year after the election. When the gunfire stops, the camera moves in on a boy sitting on the steps of a building, his head partly covered by his coat as if he’s grabbing a nap. It’s only when the camera is on top of him that we see the pool of blood. The image of that boy haunts Our Brand Is Crisis, so that the U.S. strategists who do a bang-up job of getting the wrong man elected to the wrong place at the wrong time look like agents of catastrophe.

These consultants, who work for the firm of Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum, aren’t the ultrasecret fat-cat right-wing corporatists of most muckraking documentaries. They even give lip service to progressive ideals. While acknowledging the immense profits to be made, they argue that with the export of American-style democracy comes the need for would-be leaders to market themselves to their people as well as to the rest of the economically globalized globe.