UK: Palin as America's demogogue-in-chief

The Guardian

Sarah Palin returns to centre stage in HBO's Game Change

Two-hour exploration of 2008 campaign depicts Palin's rapid rise and fall – and those who shoved her into the spotlight
By Ed Pilkington

There's a moment early on in HBO's new movie on the 2008 presidential election, Game Change, in which Sarah Palin is being whisked away from the relative obscurity of her governor's mansion in Alaska to become John McCain's presidential running mate. The appointment, she has been warned, will instantly turn her into one of the most famous people on the planet and change her life forever.

"You seem totally unfazed by this," Steve Schmidt, McCain's top campaign strategist observes as she sits utterly poised on board a private jet. She turns to him, looks him square in the eye, and replies: "It's God's plan."

The scene is one of several chilling moments in a film that is less about Sarah Palin herself than about the high-stakes and at times cynical calculations that lie behind a presidential campaign. This is HBO's two-hour exploration of the dark side of the road to the White House.

But haven't we had enough of Sarah Palin already? OK, we were obsessed with her for a while and laughed out loud with Tina Fey. But hasn't the world moved on?

Yes, in many ways it has, leaving Palin looking increasingly irrelevant. But as director Jay Roach reminds us, it all happened so quickly, with so much crammed into just 60 heady days, that it makes for compelling drama.

The beauty is in the compressed narrative arc of the Palin story. From nobody to global celebrity, to Katie Couric victim, to defeated candidate, to demogogic Tea Party favourite – that's enough to fill several years, but it happened in just two months.

The film opens with McCain and his advisers angsting over what they call his "gender problem". The Arizona senator is 20% behind his rival Barack Obama with female voters.

"So find me a woman," orders McCain. Which is precisely what they do, plucking Palin out of her moose-hunting, hockey-mom backwater and flinging her into the fiercest media scrum on Earth.

The results aren't pretty. "We threw her in the deep end without a life preserver," McCain, played by Ed Harris, says towards the end of the film, to which Schmidt replies: "Yeah, and we're drowning with her, sir."

Julianne Moore captures the Alaskan governor and mother of five with great compassion, so much so that as a viewer you almost begin to have that unfamiliar sensation of feeling sorry for Palin. The screenplay, by Danny Strong, goes further than the book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin on which it was based by sending Palin into a catatonic state ahead of the vice-presidential election.

"I want my baby," she groans.

Later, we even hear one McCain aide wonder whether she might be mentally unstable.

Moore, too, captures all the little foibles that set Palin so apart from the grey-suited male world of Washington: her wave to the crowd with hand held high, her hometown gal winks, her Wasilla twang and regular use of the word "also".

But Moore and Roach do less well at capturing the power of Palin. The film depicts the outcome of what happened – the huge crowds and the intensifying devotion of millions of Americans – without helping us understand it; how did Palin manage to unleash such fervour? What does it tell us about her, and more importantly, about the American people?

But as I say, Game Change is not really about Palin. The true star is Woody Harrelson, who hogs the moral and dramatic centre of the movie, playing Steve Schmidt.

It is Schmidt's initiative that first brings Palin in front of McCain as a possible VP choice, and Schmidt who urges McCain to go for her as a game-changing punt even though she has not been properly vetted.

By the end of the film, it is Schmidt, captured with conviction and nuance by Harrelson, who is seen racked by guilt over having set loose a political Frankenstein. "This wasn't a campaign, it was a bad reality show," he says.

It is no surprise that the real Sarah Palin doesn't care for HBO's rendition of her, after all, Schmidt was a main source for the Game Change book. The movie does not spare her the cruellest details of those 60 days – her briefing for interviews which involved her having to be shown where Germany is on a map, or told that Saddam Hussein did not attack America on 9/11.

Such devastating anecdotes clearly still rankle with her, sufficiently to have her political fundraising arm SarahPAC put out its own mini-version of the film called Game Change You Can Believe In. It gives, as you might imagine, a rather more forgiving account of her days on the presidential campaign trail.

The movie leaves us on a menacing note, with McCain exhorting Palin not to go down a path towards extremism and instead stick to being "a hockey-mom who just wanted to make a difference". Roach is clearly inviting us to ponder the hidden menace of American populism with Palin as its demogogue-in-chief.

But in fact he merely succeeds in the opposite. He raises the question of what happened to Sarah Palin? Why didn't she prove to be a game-changer after all?

Game Change debuts on Saturday in the US, 9pm ET, on HBO; and on Sky 1 HD on 26 April in the UK.

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