Game Change

Ed Harris and Julianne Moore as McCain and Palin in Game Change
The HBO-produced adaptation of Mark Halperin andJohn Heilemann’s best-selling 2009 book, GameChange centers on the John McCain-Sarah Palin part of the ticket for the2008 Presidential election.  While thebook looked at Clinton and Obama’s dust-up over the Democratic nomination aswell as McCain’s eventual fight for the vote against Obama, the film adaptationfocuses on the selection and requisite care and feeding of the star personalitywho became Sarah Palin.
Impersonated with empathetic, uncanny likeness byJulianne Moore, Palin appears in Danny Strong’s script just as she did inHalperin and Heilemann’s book—as an ignorant, child-like woman thrust into thenational limelight way too fast, way too soon, and way too recklessly by acampaign trying to “do something bold” to shift attention from Obama’s meteoricrise in popular favor.
With a breezy, rather snarky tone, the bookdoesn’t waste time lambasting McCain staffers for their lightly vetted choiceof the then barely known governor from Alaska. Based on the numbers game that now determines elections, the McCain campaignrealizes that they’ll lose if they can’t close the gender gap that’s opened inthe polls.
Although McCain is intent on selecting JoeLieberman as his “bold choice” for a running mate, to demonstrate thatbipartisanship is possible on a presidential ticket, Lieberman’s pro-choicereputation makes him a bad pick for holding onto the far Right voters who arenow necessary to secure the Republican base. (Game Change takes place in2008.  The present contest for theRepublican nomination demonstrates how much farther the extreme Right hasthrust itself into the party.)
When Rick Davis (Peter MacNicol), McCain’s nationalcampaign manager, stumbles across a YouTube video of Palin chatting with aninterviewer, he’s captivated by her charisma, poise, and attractiveness.  The brief scene underlines that Palin’scompetition wasn’t stiff; the other women Davis watches are obviously competentpoliticians but dreary, uninspiring (and, not insignificantly, unattractive) performers. Game Change emphasizes thatPalin is an adept political actor, following the footsteps of her hero, RonaldReagan (who was nothing if not a consummate, Hollywood-trained matinee idol).
Davis and other McCain staffers quickly realizethat Palin has much of Reagan’s magnetism, and soon, she’s on the ticket, appealingto Republican voters with her “aw shucks” performance of ordinariness.  What soon appalls the McCain campaign is howlittle real knowledge of the political system supports her sudden appearance inthe national arena.
Where the book was a biting indictment of Palinand what it painted as her self-involved, self-aggrandizing machinations, thefilm 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 wasinvited to take the number two spot on McCain’s ticket without being carefully vetted.
In a scene illustrating her only pre-announcement interviewwith Steve Schmidt (Woody Harrelson) and Mark Salter (Jamey Sheridan), McCain’smost powerful staffers, they ask questions to determine her willingness toplay by McCain’s rules and espouse his views (a promise on which she ultimatelyreneges).  But they never dream that shecan’t cite a single Supreme Court case or that she might not know what “theFed” represents.
The film portrays the McCain campaign’sincredulity when Palin’s real deficits begin to emerge.  Attempting to prep her for debates andinterviews on national television, Palin is truculent and withholding, reducingfrustrated staffers to providing boilerplate answers to the questions they anticipatewill be posed.


But the film suggests it’s not reallyPalin’s fault that she’s in way over her head. She excelled as the governor of a small state in which she met voters atthe fair with her family (represented in an early scene), and chatted with constituents one-on-one as she took herdaughters on the rides.
Moore perfectly captures Palin’s folksy, somehowsincere warmth in those early pre-vp selection scenes, and demonstrates, in herfirst meeting with Schmidt, that Palin has more steely reserve than firstappears.  Her debate prep scenes are bothhorrifying and pathetic, as Palin sits with a pencil and a notebook furiouslyscribbling down information that staffers lecture at her.  She seems a reluctant student, but one eagerto prove that she can pass the course.
But she passes her way, and becomes the wrong sort ofmaverick in the McCain campaign.  As shegains confidence from the warm crowds she attracts at personal appearances, powerbegins to change Palin into a more Machiavellian operative who’s more concernedwith her own image than the campaign. But because Game Change doesn’thold her entirely responsible for being on the ticket in the first place, evenher shift into a more calculated power-grabber doesn’t read as an utterindictment.
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 Couricinterview.  Moore’s face (as Palin) is a study asshe gradually registers that Fey is making fun of her.  Alone in front of the television, Moorecarefully builds Palin’s hurt resentment, as she realizes she’s beingridiculed.  The scene humanizes Palin byimagining her feelings as she watches Fey, and helps viewers understand why shesoon becomes obsessed with her image and approval ratings.
Game Changealso presents Palin’s family respectfully. Todd Palin’s political peccadillos are washed with a patina ofinnocence, and even Bristol’s pregnancy seems like just another adolescentindiscretion.  Of course, the story picksup before their lives have been invaded by a rabid national media, but the filmdepicts the family as sincere and rather naïve, as wounded as Sarah by whatthey see as the campaign’s and the press’s betrayal.
By giving Palin’s personal life a pass, andthrough Moore’s remarkably sympathetic performance, Game Change’s discerning critique falls more softly on themercurial personality quirks of a woman untested in the baiting and switchingof hardball national life than it does on an expedient political system drivenby 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’sproblems, and the movie’s narrative turns mostly on his trajectory.
Played by Harrelson with a swagger that dissolvesinto humiliation, Game Change tracesSchmidt’s horrified understanding of his mistake and the consequences it couldhave had for the nation had McCain been elected.  The film is bookended by scenes of AndersonCooper interviewing Harrelson-as-Schmidt about his reflections on the 2008election after the fact.
Schmidt deflects Cooper’s direct probing aboutwhether Palin was truly ready to assume the presidency.  He does, however, squirm when Cooper remindshim that she was the vice presidential nominee for a candidate who was 72-years-oldduring the campaign and had already suffered two bouts of melanoma.  These framing interviews are juxtaposed deftlywith Game Change’s scenes of Palin stumblingover basic knowledge of the American political system, which allows the film’scritique to laser in on handlers like Schmidt, for whom performance and thesuperficiality of capturing the camera’s attention was, for a time, moreimportant than anything else.
Game Change chroniclesPalin’s change alongside Schmidt’s.  Ifthey start as uneasy allies, by the film’s (and the campaign’s) end, they’readversaries.  Palin insists on giving herown concession speech the night of the election; Schmidt practically spits ather when he tells her that vice presidential candidates never give suchspeeches.  For Palin, unburdened byknowledge of precedent, the rules are up for grabs.
Her willingness to put her finger in the eye ofWashington went on to endear Palin to Tea Party-ers looking for a heroine.  Her empty charisma and her superficial easeconnecting with voters through a medium that looks intimate while it maintainsa boundless distance did indeed change the game.
Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times, published several blogs on the film that addressthe question of McCain’s campaign staffers’ loyalty.  Bruni argues that if the dirty laundry of necessarilybrutal campaign practices is hung out publically to dry, as it is in this film, honorable potentialcandidates will shy from the most bruising, most prominent races.
But the confidentiality of the political processseems an already dead issue.  What Game Change underlines for me was howmercenary McCain’s male staffers were in playing to the gender gap, choosing afemale 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 persistentproblem of Sarah Palin, a woman who went on to co-opt feminism for her ownselfish purposes, who continues to champion her political ignorance, and whoremains the star of a fictional “Main Street” on which “ordinary” Americanpeople are white, straight, racist, homophobic, anti-choice, and proud of theirpolitical stupidity.
Game Changeends with Schmidt, Davis, and Salter drinking in a bar on election night afterMcCain has conceded.  They ruefully agreethat McCain’s loss let them dodge the bullet that Palin as vice presidentwould have shot into the American political system.  But the film (and the book) also lets themoff the hook.  They down their drinks,shake their heads sheepishly, and go off to run other campaigns, bearing noon-going responsibility for ushering Palin so far into political power.
Scary stuff.
The Feminist Spectator
Game Change, HBO and on-demand.