Sarah Palin: Silent Movie “Superstar”?

Politics and cinema are definitely compatible in Hollywood. After Meryl Streep got an Oscar for her role as Margaret Thatcher, Julianne Moore now plays Sarah Palin in an HBO movie adaptation of Game Change, written by two journalists, describing the path of the running mate of Republican John McCain, Obama’s opponent in 2008. Find the timing for this event a little odd? On the eve of Super Tuesday, which should let Mitt Romney run as the Republican candidate for 2012, are we watching Sarah Palin’s last Sunset Boulevard? We almost no longer hear from Sarah, a performer unused to supporting roles, especially silent ones. Say hello to The Artist!

Cinema doesn’t really suit Sarah Palin.

Her first appearance in The Undefeated, on her brief career as governor of Alaska, was supposed to launch her candidacy in the Iowa Republican primaries, in June 2011. And wham! Bad timing and the rise of a new and temporary Republican star, Michele Bachmann, turned the evening’s show into a failure — as well as pointing out the exit door for Sarah Palin, for whom nothing was going right anymore. In addition, Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota representative, was projected to the front of the stage with the formation of a tea party group on Capitol Hill in the wake of the 2010 midterm elections, won by the GOP. Furthermore, the schemer gained a national reputation when she answered President Obama on behalf of HER group, at the State of the Union Speech, thus alienating the Republican leadership, and the star and “Godmother” of the tea partiers: Sarah Palin. It was just like being at the movies watching two stars fighting for the title role.

The Undefeated itself came after a great feature of romanticized reality TV: Sarah Palin’s Alaska. The series on Alaska was produced for TLC and designed to anchor the former governor firmly in her state. The pilot of this five-episode series was watched by more than five million viewers, mostly in Alaska, and as usual provoked a controversy on the true involvement of Sarah Palin in her state.

With Hollywood and a real star — Julianne Moore — in the role of Sarah Palin, we went up a notch. Inspired by the book Game Change, it’s the story of the McCain/Palin two-month campaign in 2008. Far from shedding a kind light on Sarah Palin, it seems to cheer for her downfall. It’s uncompromising on the knowledge gaps of the vice presidential candidate, and it describes how disastrous she would have been in the job if… Sarah Palin was not wrong when she saw in this movie Hollywood’s “pro-leftist, pro-Barack Obama machine.” Sarah Palin discovered how an independent production could hurt her, and now how a show in the middle of the Republican primaries could silence her. No one even heard her say that Hollywood lies. Just like The Artist, she is now reduced to a silent role in the middle of the presidential blockbuster: it’s a real nightmare.