This powerful and beautiful film succeeded on many fronts: the filmmakers provide the audience with a compelling cast of characters, complete with Heroes and Villains, whose lives are impacted in one fashion or another by the issue of Gay Marriage. They also do a nice job fashioning a clear plot for the audience to follow and become emotionally invested in (I was personally moved to tears a number of times during the film) and did a nice job building the drama around the key turning points for the bills under debate.<br /><br />Where I really think the film succeeds is in making all the people in the film real and three-dimensional, there wasn't a lot of jingoistic talking points being tossed around, just real human drama and real emotion in the discussion of the issues faced by gay men and women...and that will go a long way to softening the hearts and minds of the general public who really doesn't understand the issue (like the lobbyist says in the film...it plants little seeds that can eventually grow large enough to break down the walls in people's minds).<br /><br />It's easy when taking on a subject like this to show the opposition as cartoon characters and the film tries to show the other side and does a fairly decent job of balancing the argument by not making Gay Marriage opponents too over-the-top or making too much fun of them.