'Game Change' is an old Hollywood story, a la 'A Star Is Born'
According to its filmmakers, the movie, which debuted Saturday, is a scrupulously well-sourced account of Palins ascendancy to the national stage. According to its detractors, who include McCain and Palin, as well as much of Palins campaign staff, the film is just another example of showbiz liberal bias. As Palin put it the other day: Hollywood lies are Hollywood lies. . . . The movie is based on a false narrative.
Palin is the wide-eyed young starlet plucked from small-town obscurity and thrust into the spotlight, forced to rely on her innate self-confidence to survive in a shark tank full of jaded performers, I mean, politicos. McCain is portrayed as the aging leading man, an ex-war hero ho! ping for one last hurrah, forced to choose between his flinty integrity and the opportunistic demands of a new media age.
The entire Palin-McCain relationship has an uncanny similarity to the story arc of A Star Is Born, except that the twosome are a couple thrown together by political expediency, not starry-eyed romance.
Its hardly an exaggeration to say that no story line has deeper roots in Hollywoods family tree. The earliest days of talkies were populated with dozens of backstage melodramas, from 1929s Broadway Melody to 1933s 42nd Street to 1934s Twentieth Century and 1936s The Great Ziegfeld. The early 1950s were also crammed with similar stories, notably in films suchas All About Eve, The Bad and the Beautiful, Singing in the Rain and The Band Wagon.
Even today, the genre is alive and well. Look at The Artist, the Oscar best picture winner that unfolds in late-1920s Hollywood. Both "The Artist" and "Game Change" feature men struggling to keep their relevancy, whether its in a new-media dominated political world or a film industry being reinvented by talkies. Both films center on easily underestimated women who are transformed into instant stars, thanks to their ambition and an innate connection with the hoi polloi.
When I spoke to Game Change director Jay Roach the other day, he broke into a broad grin when I brought up the backstage drama comparisons. Frankly, thats all I was interested in when we started working on the film, he explained. Thats what makes politics socompelling today. The audience sees all of the show and presentation that comes across in the debates and speeches and TV ads. But what we dont get to see is the influence of the strategists and campaign managers who are always there, behind the scenes.
Roach has always had a fascination with similar manipulators. Long before he emerged as a top comedy director with such hits as Austin Powers and Meet the Parents, he produced The Empty Mirror, a little-seen 1996 speculative drama about Adolf Hitler coming to te! rms with his infamy. Even then, I was more interested in Goebbels than Hitler, he says. He was the idea guy who made the horrible ideas seem like they were good ones. He was the spinmeister.
The backstage aspect of campaign image makingfirst openly captured on film in the 1993 documentary War Room--clearly fueled Roachs interest in making Game Change." "The people in the back rooms are a lot like screenwriters, in the sense that they come up with the right narrative to pitch to the public.
Even though hes best known for his work in comedy, politics is never far from Roachs mind. In 2004, he produced a reality TV series about finding grassroots candidates who would run in that years presidential election. In 2008, he directed Recount, an HBO film about the contested 2000 presidential election. Hes now in post-production on The Campaign, a comedy due this August that stars Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as rival candidates embroiled in a nasty race for a congressional seat in North Carolina.
Although the story is played for laughs, it has roots in reality: Galifianakis uncle, Nick Galifianakis, was a three-term Democratic congressman in North Carolina who ran for the Senate in 1972, only to be beaten in a bruising campaign by Jesse Helms. The movie is all about the power of the Super PACs and negative campaigning, Roach says. Its really what Im trying to get across in Game Change as well. Do we want to live in a world where the electoral process feels like a reality TV show or a Sunday afternoon World Wrestling match?
Having closely followed the 2008 campaign, Roach told HBO hed love to do a film that put viewers into a backstage political environment. Once he saw former McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt on 60 Minutes, offering a withering assessment of Palin, he knew he had a movie. If you put people together who dont know each other very well in a high-stakes game, battling their opponent while theyre also fighting each other, he says, "you have the makings of classic drama.
In t he early days of the movies, backstage dramas offered audiences an opportunity for an inside peek into the lives of stars at a time when theprint media presented a well-scrubbed portrait of showpeoples private lives. So its only natural that todays backstage dramas gravitate toward politicians, since life in Washington involves as much image-making as any practiced in Hollywood.
Game Change joins a sizable contingent of backstage political dramas, from Wag the Dog and Primary Colors to W and The Ides of March. Todays audiences, having grown up in a reality TV culture, are eager to see past the political tinsel--the polished speeches, campaign ads and debate performancesand get a good look at how the sausage is being made.
Whether it's a sex scandal, graft and corruption or just Palin's diva-style antics,the misadventures of public figuresoffer terrific fodder for filmmakers like Roach, who see richstorytelling possibilities in the huge chasm between appearance and reality in politics.
Near the end of Game Change, a McCain operative says, The ones who dont pathologically need to be lovedthey dont get elected. He was talking about politicians, but hey, the description is a perfect fit for almost any movie star whos ever roamed the planet. In politics or in showbiz, stone cold narcissism makes for irresistible drama.
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--Patrick Goldstein
Photo: Julianne Moore, left, as Sarah Palin, and Ed Harris as Sen. John McCain in a scene! from th e HBO film "Game Change."
Credit: Phil Caruso/Associated Press/HBO
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