Anderson Cooper In A Movie On HBO

Fine Tuning column for Saturday, March 10

By Alex Strachan, Postmedia News

The decision to choose Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign was about winning elections, not about who would make the best vice-president, 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper tells Woody Harrelson, playing McCain's chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, in the opening seconds of Game Change.

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Peter's comment:

Will the REAL Anderson Cooper will interview Woody Harrelson's character? Or, if he doesn't, then who will be playing Anderson? We'll have to watch the opening seconds of "Game Change" on Saturday on HBO at 9:00 PM ET.

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``My job is to give political advice,'' Harrelson-as-Schmidt replies in carefully measured tones. ``We needed to do something bold, to try to win the race.''

If you had to do it over again, Cooper continues, ``Would you have her on the ticket?''

That exchange actually happened, during a revealing 60 Minutes segment that aired in 2010, two years after Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's historic election as the 44th President of the United States, and the country's first black president.

Mediocre made-for-TV biopics are a dime a dozen these days, but very few - and Game Change is one of the very few - reach for greatness.

Game Change is riveting, ferocious, fast-paced, smart, and as thrilling as any TV thriller. It is propelled by an almost inexorable energy. There are no gun battles or car chases, no fist fights or terrorist bombings - just the to-and-fro of adults settling adult differences in what they believe is an adult way. This is bravura filmmaking, not just on the small screen, but on any screen.

Game Change is as good as any film about politics I have seen, from Michael Ritchie and Robert Redford's The Candidate in the early '70s to, more recently, George Clooney's The Ides of March and the 2008 film, Recount, written and directed by the same writer, Danny Strong, and director, Jay Roach, who directed Game Change.

It isn't just the acting, which is of an almost astonishing standard across the board, not just from Ed Harris as McCain and Julianne Moore as Palin, who both give larger-than-life, showy, award-worthy performances. Every role, from the principals down to the undervalued, overlooked campaign functionaries, has been cast with an exquisite eye for detail.

Game Change - loosely adapted from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's deeply textured book of the same name - has already caused a stir, for what some say is a slanted view of recent American history, and for the almost casual way it shows a big-money, sophisticated media campaign spin slowly and inexorably out of control.

All that is true. Game Change does provide a blinkered, narrow view of history. It does show a campaign veering off the rails, despite the efforts of high-priced spin doctors and media consultants to put it back on track. Game Change is sophisticated 21st-century filmmaking at its most manipulative: Almost every moment, from the eye-filling conventions with their swelling music and crowds screaming in hysteria, to the backroom brawls between ``middle-aged white guys,'' as Harrelson's campaign strategist dryly puts it, is calculated for effect.

Game Change's real achievement, though, is the way it takes a media caricature - Sarah Palin as a backcountry nitwit - and portrays her as something more complicated and believable: a determined, defiant mother of five and canny state politician who was elevated by Washington insiders to an almost deity-like status, and then, when she failed to live up to their expectations, was thrown to the wolves by those very same backroom boys.

Game Change isn't as much an indictment of Palin's credibility as a viable vice-presidential candidate as it is a damning expose of the political game as it's played by Schmidt's ``middle-aged white guys.''

In the real world, Palin's supporters have dismissed Game Change as ``fact change,'' without seeing the film. In reality, Game Change is a searing, incisive look at how consultants don't always know what they're doing, and sometimes get it completely and utterly wrong. If you see just one made-for-TV movie this year, make it Game Change. It's that good.

(HBO, 9 ET/8 PT)