Pictures can manipulate opinion. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is about this fact, but it's also an example of it. Documentary filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain were actually inside the presidential palace of Caracas, Venezuela, with their cameras before, during, and after the democratically elected government was forcibly dissolved in a bloodless coup in 2002 and miraculously restored 48 hours later. Told with sympathy for the country's polarizing president, Hugo Chávez, the story behind the headlines is riveting. While the coup has the ingredients of Latin American turmoil that we've read about for ages — populist military leaders, violent demonstrations in the streets, oil barons scrapping for supremacy, barely-contained contempt for democracy — the tools of power have changed in the information age. Television stations are fortresses, new leaders dismantle government institutions while standing behind banks of microphones, and the passions in the streets are captured by video cameras.

The documentary's name (as it has been released in the U.S.) is inspired by Chávez's claim that most TV stations in Venezuela are controlled by the elites who oppose him and his "revolutionary" government. The most salient example of their control is an incident that changed much of the public's opinion of Chávez. Just before the coup, TV stations repeatedly showed damning footage of Chávez's supporters apparently firing at peaceful protesters who were calling for the president's resignation. The movie claims that because of the camera angle, it was impossible to see that the people were actually firing not at demonstrators but at snipers, and that the streets just outside the frame were empty because marchers had taken a different route. The filmmakers present footage that seems to show the missing angle.

It's an important lesson, to know the biases of those presenting the information and know how editing can omit inconvenient details, and viewers of this movie should apply it before they leave the theater. The documentary builds sympathy for Chávez by showing him as a regular guy who repeatedly talks about honoring the constitution. He encourages a crowd to read it, he hammers home its policies, and his supporters are shown telling some of the people who were involved in the coup that it will protect even them.

But the movie elides or glosses over some important details that newcomers to the Chávez vision might want to know before hailing him as a lover of freedom and democracy. The constitution that he waves to crowds in the form of a little blue book is something that he himself put in place while he was in office. In 1992, before he was president, he lead an unsuccessful coup to overthrow the elected government (the movie leaves out the word "elected" when it tells us this). And as much as he claims to love his constitution, he presses its edges whenever it helps him sustain or expand his power: he threatens the supposedly independent Supreme Court justices, telling them that the army and the people aren't going to accept certain decisions; he expands the size of the Supreme Court so he can add cronies; he takes control of the Caracas police department; and he makes it difficult for people to keep their jobs with the state-owned oil company, one of the country's biggest employers, if they sign a petition calling for a constitutionally-allowed presidential recall election. (As of this writing, signature-gathering continues in hopes of legally removing the president before his term is up.) The movie doesn't hint at this side of its beloved Chávez.

The leaders of the opposition are not necessarily democrats, either, having overthrown the government by force instead of through elections. They so embarrassed themselves with their unconstitutional behavior that even their contacts in the U.S. government could not outright applaud their actions. The U.S., however, doesn't wear its freedom-and-democracy costume well, either, when it fails to condemn a coup against a fairly elected but problematic president of an oil-producing country. In the movie, Ari Fleischer repeats the claims about Chávez's supporters firing on demonstrators and all but says Chávez brought the coup on himself. He may have. He may have ruined his country's economy with his capricious and erratic manipulation of the currency exchange rates. It may be all the more reason to vote him out, but it's no reason to get rid of democracy altogether.

This movie, then, is a mixed bag, but in the end I think movies like this serve a purpose. They show us the faces behind the news. I remember reading the news briefs about the coup in Venezuela in the paper and not thinking much about them, I'm sad to say. It was remote, abstract. But after seeing the stunning first-hand video footage and getting to know a few of the personalities and issues involved, I had a strong desire to go back through the online news archives and read more about this situation, which is where I got a very different view of the whole mess. A movie like this is not the place to get all of the facts, but it's an invaluable way to put faces to the names and passions to the black-and-white typography. We also get pictures on the nightly news, of course, but they're dumped from a satellite, not carefully pored over by filmmakers who have the time to assemble a cohesive narrative. A documentary is no more or less truthful, no more or less manipulative, than the filtered TV images, but a debate of considered arguments is preferable to a debate of sound bites, even if some of those arguments are flawed.