The HBO-produced adaptation of Mark Halperin and
John Heilemann’s best-selling 2009 book, Game
Change centers on the John McCain-Sarah Palin part of the ticket for the
2008 Presidential election. While the
book looked at Clinton and Obama’s dust-up over the Democratic nomination as
well as McCain’s eventual fight for the vote against Obama, the film adaptation
focuses on the selection and requisite care and feeding of the star personality
who became Sarah Palin.
Impersonated with empathetic, uncanny likeness by
Julianne Moore, Palin appears in Danny Strong’s script just as she did in
Halperin and Heilemann’s book—as an ignorant, child-like woman thrust into the
national limelight way too fast, way too soon, and way too recklessly by a
campaign trying to “do something bold” to shift attention from Obama’s meteoric
rise in popular favor.
With a breezy, rather snarky tone, the book
doesn’t waste time lambasting McCain staffers for their lightly vetted choice
of the then barely known governor from Alaska.
Based on the numbers game that now determines elections, the McCain campaign
realizes that they’ll lose if they can’t close the gender gap that’s opened in
the polls.
Although McCain is intent on selecting Joe
Lieberman as his “bold choice” for a running mate, to demonstrate that
bipartisanship is possible on a presidential ticket, Lieberman’s pro-choice
reputation makes him a bad pick for holding onto the far Right voters who are
now necessary to secure the Republican base.
(Game Change takes place in
2008. The present contest for the
Republican nomination demonstrates how much farther the extreme Right has
thrust itself into the party.)
When Rick Davis (Peter MacNicol), McCain’s national
campaign manager, stumbles across a YouTube video of Palin chatting with an
interviewer, he’s captivated by her charisma, poise, and attractiveness. The brief scene underlines that Palin’s
competition wasn’t stiff; the other women Davis watches are obviously competent
politicians but dreary, uninspiring (and, not insignificantly, unattractive) performers.
Game Change emphasizes that
Palin is an adept political actor, following the footsteps of her hero, Ronald
Reagan (who was nothing if not a consummate, Hollywood-trained matinee idol).
Davis and other McCain staffers quickly realize
that Palin has much of Reagan’s magnetism, and soon, she’s on the ticket, appealing
to Republican voters with her “aw shucks” performance of ordinariness. What soon appalls the McCain campaign is how
little real knowledge of the political system supports her sudden appearance in
the national arena.
Where the book was a biting indictment of Palin
and what it painted as her self-involved, self-aggrandizing machinations, the
film adaptation, directed by Jay Roach (Recount),
is in most ways kinder to the former governor.
Strong’s script underlines that she never asked for the spotlight, and was
invited to take the number two spot on McCain’s ticket without being carefully vetted.
In a scene illustrating her only pre-announcement interview
with Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) and Mark Salter (Jamey Sheridan), McCain’s
most powerful staffers, they ask questions to determine her willingness to
play by McCain’s rules and espouse his views (a promise on which she ultimately
reneges). But they never dream that she
can’t cite a single Supreme Court case or that she might not know what “the
Fed” represents.
The film portrays the McCain campaign’s
incredulity when Palin’s real deficits begin to emerge. Attempting to prep her for debates and
interviews on national television, Palin is truculent and withholding, reducing
frustrated staffers to providing boilerplate answers to the questions they anticipate
will be posed.
But the film suggests it’s not really Palin’s fault that she’s in way over her head. She excelled as the governor of a small state in which she met voters at the fair with her family (represented in an early scene), and chatted with constituents one-on-one as she took her daughters on the rides.
But the film suggests it’s not really Palin’s fault that she’s in way over her head. She excelled as the governor of a small state in which she met voters at the fair with her family (represented in an early scene), and chatted with constituents one-on-one as she took her daughters on the rides.
Moore perfectly captures Palin’s folksy, somehow
sincere warmth in those early pre-vp selection scenes, and demonstrates, in her
first meeting with Schmidt, that Palin has more steely reserve than first
appears. Her debate prep scenes are both
horrifying and pathetic, as Palin sits with a pencil and a notebook furiously
scribbling down information that staffers lecture at her. She seems a reluctant student, but one eager
to prove that she can pass the course.
But she passes her way, and becomes the wrong sort of
maverick in the McCain campaign. As she
gains confidence from the warm crowds she attracts at personal appearances, power
begins to change Palin into a more Machiavellian operative who’s more concerned
with her own image than the campaign.
But because Game Change doesn’t
hold her entirely responsible for being on the ticket in the first place, even
her shift into a more calculated power-grabber doesn’t read as an utter
indictment.
In one of the film’s most poignant scenes,
Moore-as-Palin watches Tina Fey-as-Palin re-perform on Saturday Night Live the real Sarah Palin’s devastating Katie Couric
interview. Moore’s face (as Palin) is a study as
she gradually registers that Fey is making fun of her. Alone in front of the television, Moore
carefully builds Palin’s hurt resentment, as she realizes she’s being
ridiculed. The scene humanizes Palin by
imagining her feelings as she watches Fey, and helps viewers understand why she
soon becomes obsessed with her image and approval ratings.
Game Change
also presents Palin’s family respectfully.
Todd Palin’s political peccadillos are washed with a patina of
innocence, and even Bristol’s pregnancy seems like just another adolescent
indiscretion. Of course, the story picks
up before their lives have been invaded by a rabid national media, but the film
depicts the family as sincere and rather naïve, as wounded as Sarah by what
they see as the campaign’s and the press’s betrayal.
By giving Palin’s personal life a pass, and
through Moore’s remarkably sympathetic performance, Game Change’s discerning critique falls more softly on the
mercurial personality quirks of a woman untested in the baiting and switching
of hardball national life than it does on an expedient political system driven
by television cameras and polling numbers.
The film emphasizes that Schmidt, McCain’s senior strategist, was full of hubris to think that Palin would solve the campaign’s
problems, and the movie’s narrative turns mostly on his trajectory.
Played by Harrelson with a swagger that dissolves
into humiliation, Game Change traces
Schmidt’s horrified understanding of his mistake and the consequences it could
have had for the nation had McCain been elected. The film is bookended by scenes of Anderson
Cooper interviewing Harrelson-as-Schmidt about his reflections on the 2008
election after the fact.
Schmidt deflects Cooper’s direct probing about
whether Palin was truly ready to assume the presidency. He does, however, squirm when Cooper reminds
him that she was the vice presidential nominee for a candidate who was 72-years-old
during the campaign and had already suffered two bouts of melanoma. These framing interviews are juxtaposed deftly
with Game Change’s scenes of Palin stumbling
over basic knowledge of the American political system, which allows the film’s
critique to laser in on handlers like Schmidt, for whom performance and the
superficiality of capturing the camera’s attention was, for a time, more
important than anything else.
Game Change chronicles
Palin’s change alongside Schmidt’s. If
they start as uneasy allies, by the film’s (and the campaign’s) end, they’re
adversaries. Palin insists on giving her
own concession speech the night of the election; Schmidt practically spits at
her when he tells her that vice presidential candidates never give such
speeches. For Palin, unburdened by
knowledge of precedent, the rules are up for grabs.
Her willingness to put her finger in the eye of
Washington went on to endear Palin to Tea Party-ers looking for a heroine. Her empty charisma and her superficial ease
connecting with voters through a medium that looks intimate while it maintains
a boundless distance did indeed change the game.
Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times, published several blogs on the film that address
the question of McCain’s campaign staffers’ loyalty. Bruni argues that if the dirty laundry of necessarily
brutal campaign practices is hung out publically to dry, as it is in this film, honorable potential
candidates will shy from the most bruising, most prominent races.
But the confidentiality of the political process
seems an already dead issue. What Game Change underlines for me was how
mercenary McCain’s male staffers were in playing to the gender gap, choosing a
female vice presidential running mate not on the basis of her qualifications,
but on her appearance and a charisma they thought would buy votes.
Their thoughtlessness and implicit misogyny
(choose a woman, any—pretty—woman) brought the body politic the persistent
problem of Sarah Palin, a woman who went on to co-opt feminism for her own
selfish purposes, who continues to champion her political ignorance, and who
remains the star of a fictional “Main Street” on which “ordinary” American
people are white, straight, racist, homophobic, anti-choice, and proud of their
political stupidity.
Game Change
ends with Schmidt, Davis, and Salter drinking in a bar on election night after
McCain has conceded. They ruefully agree
that McCain’s loss let them dodge the bullet that Palin as vice president
would have shot into the American political system. But the film (and the book) also lets them
off the hook. They down their drinks,
shake their heads sheepishly, and go off to run other campaigns, bearing no
on-going responsibility for ushering Palin so far into political power.
Scary stuff.
The Feminist Spectator
Game Change, HBO and on-demand.