Everything the Sarah Palin Movie "Game Change" Gets Horribly Wrong

Sarah Palin

HBO's "Game Change" presents Palin as simply a bumbling Tina Fey -- and misses the real story of the 2008 campaign.

March 9, 2012

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.    READ MORE