Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever praised HBO’s “Game Change” flick on Thursday, hailing Julianne Moore’s “eerily perfect take on Palin” and not only hailed the movie, but the cinematic hackwork that preceded it on HBO, the “Recount” movie on Al Gore’s “win” in Florida in 2000 (from the same producers and writers). “The two films could easily stand as a matched set of quasi-historical depictions of our dirty, early-21st-century politics,” he proclaimed.
But deep in the review, Stuever revealed that HBO is scared of the bloggers at Big Hollywood and sent an “uncharacteristic” letter to critics and editors trying to rebut conservative criticism.
[Brandon] Darby wrote. “Simply calling out HBO isn’t enough. We need to watch the coming critic frenzy and specifically call them out as individuals along with their respective outlets.”
I might have missed that particular blog post if HBO hadn’t drawn my attention to it and sent a letter to TV critics and editors detailing the work and attention to detail that went into making “Game Change.” Strong, the screenwriter, “spoke to 25 people intimately involved in the campaign, including the most senior advisors. He reached out to Gov. Palin and Sen. McCain, who declined to talk to him,” the letter said.
HBO also emphasized that Palin’s own memoir, “Going Rogue,” served as secondary reference material for the filmmakers, as did all that media coverage during and after the campaign. Palin’s deputy chief of staff during the 2008 campaign served as an adviser on the movie’s set.
And so on and so on. Beneath the Breitbart gang’s anger, I sense a genuine longing to have anything like an HBO in their corner of Tinseltown— a high-quality network that would cater, even subconsciously, to conservative perspectives and interests. From HBO, I sense an uncharacteristic defensiveness about “Game Change,” expressed in a flurry of fact-checking points that, frankly, many TV watchers won’t ever dwell on.
By writing that, Stuever is underlining what he thinks HBO is: a “high-quality network that caters to liberal perspectives and interests.” (We can quibble about the “quality” of this half-fictional propaganda.)
Stuever acknowledged early in his review that the timing of this movie is rushed:
“Recount” succeeded, in part, because it had an eight-year buffer zone from the events it depicted. “Game Change” comes too soon and too raw, smack in the middle of another ugly political season."
But it’s not “too soon” if HBO is transparently campaigning against Palin because they expected her to run in 2012. In his concluding paragraphs, Stuever grants conservatives a point on the reality that HBO avoided the cinematic potential of the Democratic parts of the “Game Change” book:
Without getting into another exegesis of the content and reporting methods of Heilemann and Halperin’s book (an activity that kept Washington’s media critics and insiders atwitter for some time in early 2010), the movie version of “Game Change” reflects only a fraction of what’s there.
Other meaty stories in the book are just-as-good screenplay fodder, and they’re about Democrats: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s frustrated backstage efforts to recalibrate her campaign to blunt Barack Obama’s momentum, for example. And there’s a devastating look at how John Edwards and the late Elizabeth Edwards functioned behind the image they projected. If thorough balance were really the name of the game here, then HBO could have made “Game Change” into a miniseries, of which Palin’s travails would have been but one night’s episode.
But they didn’t, so it’s not, so here we go, off our rockers once again.
