Seeing the scary side of Sarah Palin

For many, the highlight of the 2008 American presidential campaign was not the stirring speeches of Barack Obama but Tina Fey's dead-on impression of Sarah Palin.

Drawing on her uncanny similarity to the former Republican vice-presidential candidate (that hair, those glasses), Fey nailed that breathtaking mix of arrogance and ignorance that entranced millions and had the rest of us worrying about the health of John McCain.

Fey is undoubtedly a brilliant comedy writer and performer. But in Game Change, a slick, startling made-for-TV movie from the people behind the excellent "hanging chad" 2008 docudrama Recount, it is revealed that Fey didn't have to work too hard to highlight Palin's intellectual limitations.

We learn that Palin believed that the Queen and not the prime minister was the head of the government of Great Britain, that it was Saddam Hussein who attacked the US on 9/11 and that she had no idea of the difference between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Governor, would you like to take a break?" asks one of the scholars assigned to explain to her the role played by Germany in World War I and II. "No way! This is flippin' awesome," squeals Palin, who is mimicked with Tina Fey- like exactitude by a marvellous Julianne Moore.

While this and many other infamous Palin moments, including the devastating interview with Katie Couric, make the HBO-produced Game Change very funny viewing, it's also deeply troubling, a persuasively made argument that the former governor of Alaska was woefully unprepared for high office.

It is not surprising that controversy broke out in the US when Game Change aired earlier this year, with conservatives arguing that writer Danny Strong and director Jay Roach were typical Hollywood liberals looking to discredit Republicans, especially in an election year (Palin herself called the film "Hollywood lies").

However, is not the product of hearsay but based on a highly regarded 448-page book of the same name based on 300 inter! views wi th people who worked on the Obama and McCain campaigns. Writer Danny Strong also defended his depiction of Palin as being not just ignorant of American and international affairs but an egotist and a narcissist who put her own career ahead of the good of the party and the nation.

"The film's true," said Strong, who supplemented the book with 25 of his own interviews.

"Some people who weren't comfortable talking right after the election were now ready to talk about it. And, boy, did they talk."

Even though the Palin we see in Game Change comes across as self-involved and hilariously ill-informed, she's not without her charm, which is how somebody who won over a sizeable proportion of the American people should be represented.

Completely at ease in front of the masses and the camera (well, when not being questioned by journalists) and with the common touch of all great politicians, Moore's Palin comes across as more like the lovable heroine of a screwball comedy than a cold-blooded Machiavellian operator (no Hilary Clinton, she).

Indeed, Moore imbues Palin with so much humanity that you feel her pain while she is being grilled by hard-bitten Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt (a marvellously volatile Woody Harrelson) and that of the McCain campaign foot soldiers who quickly come to realise that their candidate, while certainly a game-changing choice for the Veep, is going to be a lot more trouble than she's worth.