A Great Movie

I watched the new HBO movie Game Change last night, and I have to say it was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. In fact, it was downright frightening that the Republicans would put someone as unqualified (and crazy) as Sarah Palin "a 72 year-old heartbeat away from the White House". I urge everyone to see this movie, in the hope that it could prevent such a thing from happening again.

The stars were excellent -- Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, and Ed Harris. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Moore and Harrelson didn't wind up winning an Emmy for their performances. For an excellent review of the movie, I recommend you read the review written by Geoffrey Dunn. Here are some excerpts from that review:

(Julianne) Moore is absolutely brilliant as the ambition-driven Palin, then the newly elected governor of Alaska, who was literally plucked from the Last Frontier in Cinderella-like fashion by McCain's merry band of political strategists. Watching some of the promotional clips from the film, I was worried that Moore's rendition might not hold up for two-hours. In fact, it took me little more than a few seconds to fall into Moore's performance. She absolutely inhabits Palin. Unlike Tina Fey's celebrated comedic caricature, which is largely one-dimensional, Moore remarkably captures Palin's dark, troubled, and delusional persona. She even manifests Palin's angry-fearful-deer-in-the-headlight look during a close-up of her eyes. It's chilling.


Woody Harrelson as Schmidt is also superb, though he didn't attempt to mimic his character as did Moore. Harrelson handles the dramatic journey taken by Schmidt with grace and sensitivity, without quite capturing his bulky gravitas or serious intelligence. Ed Harris, of whom I'm a huge fan, is fine as McCain, though he is more agile and angular than the aging Senator from Arizona, and he's also missing some of McCain's subterranean anger and volatility.


Those who have argued that Game Change represents a "liberal attack" on Palin are either lying or have their heads in some very dark crevice. The film is told through the eyes of two highly respected Republican operatives, Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace (played well enough by Sarah Paulson, though without quite enough of Wallace's toughness and fire.)


Both Schmidt and Wallace served in high-level capacities in the Bush White House and as senior advisers in the McCain campaign. Both were fiercely loyal to McCain and, initially, to Palin, before they both came to the realization, along with others in the campaign's inner sanctum, that Palin was "unfit" to serve as McCain's running mate. (Wallace recently has characterized Palin as "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.") One of the most startling moments in the film comes when a weeping Wallace tells Schmidt that she hadn't voted in the election, quite clearly because of the horror of Palin's behavior on the campaign trail.


As someone who spent more than two years researching and writing my own critical book, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, I am more than a bit familiar with the terrain covered by Game Change. With few exceptions, I found its depiction of Palin's dysfunction during those fateful two months in 2008 both accurate and honest. Has there been some dramatic license taken in the film's narrative? Sure; it's not a documentary. Does it accurately capture the psychological imbalance manifested by Palin during the campaign, and, ultimately, Palin's betrayal of John McCain himself? Absolutely.


I have now watched the film twice; after both screenings I found myself moved and unsettled by it. And Palin's selection should have unsettled every American from across the political spectrum. To play this into a left-right issue, as many in the mainstream press have inanely sought to do, is to engage in sophistry, if not downright journalistic deceit. Game Change ultimately presents a moral challenge about what's right and wrong in the democratic process. It is not an ideological treatise.


To its credit, the film raises broader issues about the American political process, of which Palin is merely a symptom. Its portrayal of how the political sausage gets made does not for a pretty picture make. Near the end of the film, as a group of McCain campaign advisors sidle up to a Phoenix bar facing their inevitable defeat, Harrelson-as-Schmidt utters a prophetic line: "It wasn't a campaign, it was a bad reality show." Palin was picked by McCain's all-male pack of senior advisers not because of her experience and statesmanship, but because of a political calculus that placed a higher value on her flash than her substance. They were looking for a "game-changer" -- and they treated the political future of this country as though it were, indeed, a game.