The subtext of “Our Brand is Crisis,” a riveting documentary by Rachel Boynton about the American political consultants who helped elect Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, popularly known as Goni, as president of Bolivia in 2002 goes something like this. American-style political campaigns in which candidates are marketed like soap or hamburgers are inherently corrupt in themselves and, when imposed upon a Third World country like Bolivia, a form of American imperialism.

Leaving the substance of these contentions to one side for the moment, we may notice that they depend absolutely on what happened to Goni’s presidency in the aftermath of the election. If he had been successful – as in other circumstances he might have been – this film could not have been made.

Yet his failure had nothing whatsoever to do with the clever marketing strategies of James Carville, Tad Devine, and Jeremy Rosner of the Greenberg, Carville, Shrum consultancy.

Their success was owing to a carefully focus-group tested advertising campaign designed to split the anti-Goni vote – which everyone agreed was a substantial majority of the electorate – between the early favorite, Latin strongman Manfred Reyes Villa, and the populist Evo Morales.

They did this by concentrating their fire on Mr. Reyes Villa – stressing his military background and hinting at corruption in the amassing of his personal fortune.

Of course, this strategy could not have succeeded without the peculiarity of the Bolivian electoral system, which allows the winner of a plurality in a multi-candidate race to take home all the marbles, even though he wins (as in this case) with only 22% of the vote.

So maybe the blame should be laid at the door of whoever designed the Bolivian constitution rather than Mr. Carville and Co.?

Ms. Boynton’s own success in making a very taut, verite-style campaign thriller – at least for political junkies – similarly has nothing to do with her attempt, unsuccessful in my view, to add significance to the story by clucking her tongue about the evils of political marketing.

To her credit, she herself makes it clear that Goni’s later failure was not connected to the campaign. Instead it had to do with his politically ill-judged decisions to raise taxes on the poor and to export Bolivia’s gas through a Chilean port.

Above all, it was made inevitable by the machinations of the nasty demagogue, Evo Morales, in whipping up the popular paranoia that led to deadly riots and Goni’s resignation and subsequent flight to the United States only 14 months after his election.

Granted, the American-style manipulation of public opinion is not a pretty sight, but it is the way democratic politics works, more or less, the world over. The old aphorism about sausages and politics being the two things you don’t want to see being made inevitably comes to mind.

But the really ugly – and, by the way, violent and anti-democratic as well as anti-American – campaign is that of Mr. Morales, a representative of the Bolivian coca growers and now the newly elected president of his country.

Making that point, however, is no part of Ms. Boynton’s purpose. Presumably it has no resonance with the American cinema audience, which has come to expect Americans in these situations always to be the bad guys.

***

Boy, does the Penn family have a strong line in psycho nut jobs with an interest in politics! First Sean Penn gives us Sam Byck, the would-be assassin in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” and now, in Jeff Stanzler’s “Sorry, Haters,” Robin Wright Penn gives us Phoebe Torrance, who makes the pathetic Sam look like Hubert Humphrey.

How are you going to top this one, Sean?

Phoebe is an accountant with a television production company in New York who one night gets into a cab driven by Ashade Mouhanna (Abdellatif Kechiche), a French-speaking Syrian immigrant whose brother is being detained – quite without any justification, of course – at Guantanamo.

He tells her his story, and she offers to help him find legal assistance to get his brother out of detention.

The setup looks familiar, and we think we’re getting one type of movie – probably yet another polemic against the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” – when in fact we’re getting quite another.

Ashade remains all that the polemical movie could want him to be – innocently persecuted, sympathetic, utterly opposed to terrorism – but Phoebe doesn’t become the representative of understanding, tolerant, caring liberalism that we expect her to be.

On the contrary, she constantly reveals herself to be more and more alarmingly unbalanced until the shocking climax when she herself – caution, spoiler alert! – is prepared to commit an act of terrorism.

There is a certain meretricious cinematic charm in this portrait of a psychopath where we weren’t expecting one, but it is achieved only at the expense of rendering irrelevant the rest of the stories the film has to tell – not only that of poor Ashade and his family but also that of Phoebe’s boss (Sandra Oh), whose pathological jealousy seems to have turned her employee’s wits.

I am particularly cross with Mr. Stanzler for making the luminous Elodie Bouchez, who plays Ashade’s Canadian sister-in-law, a mere footnote to crazy Phoebe’s pathography.

There is also a sense in which the movie comes across to me, at least, as a bit of a cheat and a con trick. The war on terror and Islamic fanaticism are the great international and political issues of our time and will be for years to come. Here they are trivialized by being made merely the backdrop to the story of a twisted – and Western – individual.

Or, to put it another way, there is a lot to be said on both sides about the “clash of civilizations,” and it badly needs saying by artists and filmmakers as well as pundits and politicians. But any such discussion is short-circuited by the not-so-subtle suggestion that it’s all just a matter of the abnormal psychology of the odd fantasist and outsider.