HBO director Jay Roach and screenwriter Danny Strong spent millions of dollars and cast some of Hollywood’s biggest stars in an unparalleled effort to dispel the widespread misperception that John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign was a well-oiled machine.
Game Change, the HBO movie airing on Saturday, is based on a book of the same name, written by John Heilemann of New York magazine and Mark Halperin of Time.
If you are a fan of Sarah Palin, you will loathe this movie. If you hate Sarah Palin, large swaths of this movie will be more thrilling than pornography. If you are somewhere in the middle, you will find yourself wondering why you’re watching big-name actors reenact extremely recent events, with limited new revelations, insight, or lessons from it all. It’s kind of like watching a batch of Oscar-nominated actors performing a dramatic reading of a transcript of the last GOP presidential debate. (Colin Firth as Romney! Daniel Day-Lewis as Santorum! Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gingrich! Sir Ben Kingsley as Ron Paul!) The actors bring their best efforts, but in the end, you realize you’ve seen it before, and not even that long ago.
You have to sympathize with actors who are called upon not just to play familiar faces, but to portray them in scenes where every viewer has already seen the real-life events. Julianne Moore accurately emulates Palin’s crisp enunciation at her first event in Ohio, at the 2008 Republican convention, and in her debate with Biden but . . . why? What’s the point of showing an actress imitating something that we witnessed with our own eyes? The contrast is even odder every time the movie shifts to archival news footage of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. (An actor portrays Biden for one odd backstage pre-debate stretching routine.)
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