Game Change (2012) on Netflix
TV-MA20121h 58mBiographyDramaHistory
Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign is struggling, and his advisers want a bold choice for the ticket. They turn to Sarah Palin, Alaska's governor, and vet her in five days.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.4/1024,385 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 2010, the strategist Steve Schmidt answers questions in a television interview about the 2008 presidential race and about Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee. The story returns to 2008, when Senator John McCain asks Schmidt to abandon his plan to sit the election out and run the campaign as senior strategist, which ends with McCain winning the Republican nomination. Schmidt and the senior advisers rule out McCain's first choice, Senator Joe Lieberman. They want a running mate who can stir the conservative base, draw independents and set the campaign apart from the Bush administration, and they settle on Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. Her vetting, normally eight weeks, takes five days, and her introduction lifts the campaign in the polls.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Game Change (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Steve Schmidt, the campaign's chief strategist, defended the film: "Ten weeks of the campaign are condensed into a two-hour movie. But it tells the truth of the campaign." He later said that watching it was tantamount to an out-of-body experience.
- Randy Scheunemann, who tutored Palin on foreign policy matters during the campaign, dismissed the film's accuracy: "To call this movie fiction gives fiction a bad name."
- Nicolle Wallace, a chief Palin 2008 aide, said she found Game Change highly credible and that it "captured the spirit and emotion of the campaign", but told ABC News Chief Political Correspondent George Stephanopoulos that the film was "true enough to make me squirm."
- Like Palin, McCain said he did not intend to see the film, and took issue with the "exceeding amount of coarse language" that was attributed to him in it.
- Danny Strong and Jay Roach, who had worked together as writer and director on the 2008 HBO film Recount, also considered a film dealing with Obama's primary battle against Hillary Clinton, an idea ultimately dropped due to the length and complexity of that story.
- David Hinckley of The New York Daily News wrote that Julianne Moore's physical Palin in Game Change is even more dead-on than Tina Fey's; Fey had won a Primetime Emmy in 2009 for her satirical impersonation of Palin on Saturday Night Live.
- Strong said he interviewed 25 people from the McCain-Palin campaign and referenced other books and articles, including Palin's memoir Going Rogue, in addition to the book on which the film was based.
