Documentaries

Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (Directors: Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill): Sarah Palin: You Betcha! seeks to get the real story behind the divisive former vice pres­id­en­tial can­didate and gov­ernor of Alaska, who has somehow man­aged to become a prom­inent figure on the American polit­ical land­scape, des­pite what appears to be an almost laugh­able lack of qual­i­fic­a­tions. Her short­com­ings become the focus of Broomfield and Churchill’s film, which will likely be dis­missed as a char­acter assas­sin­a­tion by the Republican right, but Palin’s defi­cien­cies are impossible to ignore. In fact, they’re front and centre.

Broomfield is best known for his doc­u­ment­aries Kurt & Courtney, Biggie & Tupac, and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, making its world premiere at the fest­ival, employs the same style used in many of his films, where Broomfield him­self fre­quently appears on-screen. Documentary pur­ists might bristle at the fact that the dir­ector, like Michael Moore, becomes such a prom­inent figure in his own films (which he also nar­rates), but it’s a style that works for him, mostly because of his quirky charm. One scene in the movie shows Broomfield arriving at an interviewee’s res­id­ence and begin­ning the inter­view with her before he’s even let inside; she talks to him through an open window as he tries to stay upright while standing on the sheet of ice that’s cov­ering her driveway, all while holding on to his ever-present boom micro­phone and audio recording equip­ment. The fact that he’s out­fitted in an ugly flannel jacket and funny looking winter hat with ear­flaps only adds to the enter­tain­ingly oddball scene.

Broomfield and Churchill (who does most of the camera work) spent ten weeks shooting in the dead of winter in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, which could best be summed up as a land of guns, God, and snow. The town itself is a bit of a fas­cin­ating sub­ject: it’s the crystal meth cap­ital of the state and home to a stag­gering 76 churches for the pop­u­la­tion of just 6,000. They inter­view Palin’s par­ents (mostly her father, Chuck), who at first are fairly wel­coming, but who soon become more leery of the film­makers as they find out they’ve been talking to some of their daughter’s enemies and detractors in town. Chuck is wor­ried about another “hit piece” by the media. Former Palin friends and class­mates are harder to find — the few that will talk tell the film­makers of wor­ries about reper­cus­sions from Palin and her sup­porters that could affect their ability to earn a living in the small town, or even their safety. One man from her high school inner circle dis­misses the revi­sionist PR job that Palin and her team did to paint her as a suc­cessful high school ath­lete who came to be known as “Sarah Barracuda” because of her tenacity. He says she was a very mediocre ath­lete and only got the “Barracuda” nick­name because their group of friends simply loved the song with the same name by Heart. The meatier parts of the film are the numerous inter­views with Palin’s former polit­ical col­leagues, who col­lect­ively depict her as someone who felt con­tempt for intel­lec­tuals, was dis­en­gaged from the polit­ical pro­cess, vin­dictive, naive, and dis­loyal. Some vari­ation of the phrase “thrown under the bus” occurs with comedic reg­u­larity from the former co-workers, but it’s most sobering when you hear a ver­sion of it from one of the senior strategists who worked on John McCain’s pres­id­en­tial cam­paign. It’s a damning indict­ment of the McCain camp that they failed to uncover Palin’s skel­etons, which appear to have been hiding in plain sight, before making her their vice pres­id­en­tial nominee.

The film­makers also speak to former family mem­bers, who use many of the same adject­ives that Palin’s polit­ical col­leagues used to describe her. Most prom­inent from this group is her former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, who was the focus of the “Troopergate” scandal that implic­ated Palin over a pos­sible abuse of her powers, while gov­ernor, to get Wooten fired from his job as a state trooper. Unsurprisingly, he has nothing good to say about her, even making some fairly pointed accus­a­tions about the par­enting skills of Palin and her father. Of course, no doc­u­mentary on Palin would be com­plete without an exam­in­a­tion of her staunch reli­gious beliefs. The most inter­esting inter­views on the topic come from an Alaskan pastor who has a rocky his­tory with Palin, not­ably their dif­fer­ences on homo­sexu­ality in the church. He wor­ries about her mental sta­bility around some­thing as important as nuc­lear launch codes because of the fact that “she believes she’s God’s anointed one”.

Palin her­self remains an elu­sive target and the film never man­ages to get any closer to her than Broomfield’s appear­ances at a few of her book sign­ings, where she’s non-committal to his inter­view requests, and Broomfield turning up in the audi­ence at a couple of her speaking engage­ments. The speaking engage­ment scenes add comedic value, but do come off as some­what grand­standing on his part as he gets kicked out of one event after sur­repti­tiously asking Palin a ques­tion from the venue floor, and resorts to using a mal­func­tioning mega­phone at another as the audi­ence files out of the arena after the event, clearly not inter­ested in talking to him.

Churchill and Broomfield took to an online funding web­site for cre­ative pro­jects called Kickstarter last month in an effort to raise funds so the film could get dis­trib­uted in US theatres. They raised a little more than their target goal of $30,000 in less than three weeks and man­aged to secure a lim­ited release in New York and Los Angeles at the end of September. Audiences will dis­cover a con­sist­ently enter­taining and occa­sion­ally rev­el­atory por­trait of one of the most fas­cin­ating polit­ical fig­ures in recent memory.

Tagged as: #tiff11, alaska, politics

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