Last night HBO aired the film “Game Change,” which has gotten mostly rave reviews. Five things:
1. It will go down as one of the greatest political films adapted from a book ever made.
2. It didn’t do Saturday Night Live type or cheap caricatures of the key players. It featured actors and actresses who were truly trying to portray characters with all the actors’ skills they could muster. These were people dealing with conflicts, triumphs and disappointments.
3. It was true to the superb book which (despite what some partisans of the left and right will say) attempted to report and was not a p.r. piece or writer’s stylistic writing ego piece but a serious, solid piece of professional reportage that seemingly revived the tired genre of Presidential election account books.
4. It was not a hit piece on Sarah Palin. In fact, you couldn’t help but watch it and understand what she went through, her love of family, her connection with special needs children, and how she was ill-served by Sen. John McCain’s staff.
5. The script and acting aside, it made masterful use of news and talking head clips, enhanced by topflight editing. Palin’s debate with Joe Biden was done using actual clips of Biden and of the actress Palin.
6. Those who don’t want to see anything depict any kind of blemish on Palin will blast it. Those who don’t want to see Palin as depicted as anything but a caricature will blast it.
7. It won’t enhance Senator John McCain’s legacy because it once again showed how woefully poor the vetting was and how McCain staffers realized that they had not done the homework the had needed to do.
UPDATE: The film’s writer and director get some tough questions from Howard Kurtz about the movie’s accuracy.
And one Team McCain’s key players and a key character portrayed in the film pretty much gives it her seal of approval. Nicolle Wallace:
“Game Change” is not a movie about Sarah Palin. And it’s definitely not about staffers like me.
It’s a film about the vast, murky gray area in which the majority of politics takes place. I’m not talking about what you see on television: the speeches, the rallies, the debates. I’m talking about the man-in-the-mirror moments, the decision-making that takes place behind closed doors, with the counsel of very few men and women, and with high stakes and irreversible consequences.
Watching “Game Change” is like reliving the most tumultuous professional roller coaster ride on which I’ve ever been. It brought back the highs – Palin’s surprise selection and her glorious moment on stage at our national convention – and the now well-documented lows.
In the end, it’s also a film about how far great men like John McCain are willing to go in order to serve the country they love. Ultimately, every candidate makes the same calculation he did: ”Whom can I select to help me win, and will that person make a good governing partner if we prevail.”
Go to the link to read the rest.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.