HBO's "Game Change" presents Palin as simply a bumbling Tina Fey --
and misses the real story of the 2008 campaign.
March 9, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in HBO's LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
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HBO's "Game Change," airing this Saturday, is not actually an
adaption of the book "Game Change," by Mark Halperin and John
Heilemann. It is "Sarah Palin Goes Rogue," the movie, with a couple of
anecdotes borrowed from the notoriously gossipy account of the 2008
election as a whole. (Or, arguably,it's an adaptation of Scott Conroy
and Shushannah Walshe's "Sarah From Alaska.")
That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily
over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it
might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it's
unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments
of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white
lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it
takes us behind closed doors, it's to witness scenes any moderately
close observer of the election and its aftermath could've dreamed up
him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the
Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous
Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark
Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning
portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.
Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into
the film. Soon we're watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You
remember the "SNL" sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you
don't, "Game Change" airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also
has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it
re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the
Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either
live or on YouTube when they happened.
Moore's performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For
one thing, she doesn't hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as
gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve
Schmidt — the film's protagonist — as a grizzled, "too old for this
shit" campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better
judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark
Salter, McCain's "conscience." Salter, the primary author of his
"Maverick" mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a
hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the
war room applauds her first speech.
But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were
pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann's primary sources, and we watch
them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin's ignorance at
exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by
her ignorance.
Because it's Hollywood, there's very little politics in the film's
depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to
write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare,
in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision
is made, it means "we'll lose by five."
There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but
it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent.
Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications
team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously
ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she
breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn't vote.
They embrace.
The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is
childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent
person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to "unfair"
— Sarah Palin doesn't know that the head of Great Britain's government
is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This
isn't Andrew Sullivan's conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It's
an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are
explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped
of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed
to "the base" because of Palin's heartfelt commitment to special-needs
children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about
Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her
teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the
film has her take a major heel turn — "if I am single-handedly
carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!" — after "winning"
her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she
is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up
crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)
The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude
but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly
fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. "Game
Change" is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all
the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn't. (At
one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the
night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically
involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin
reinforced, well, there are still those "SNL" sketches.
In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an
unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster,
but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate
was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible
principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn't know what the Fed did. Do we have
any proof John McCain knew what it should've done? Maybe everyone
actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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