Zero calories, loads of caffeine

Game Change

(2012)

I find that I have 2 things in common with Sarah Palin: (1) a deep, abiding passion for Diet Dr Pepper and (2) a tendency to freeze and withdraw when exposure of an area of ignorance makes us look stupid. True, the fact that Germany was on the other side in two world wars is not one of my areas of ignorance (and really, seriously, can that have been true of her?), but still, I know that feeling, and it made me much more sympathetic to her plight than I would have imagined myself capable of being.

And it's not just because the portrayer is My Future Wife Julianne Moore. In fact, my one misgiving about watching the film at all was having to see MFWJM as someone in whom I have invested so much animus, but it was not a problem, because the transformation was so complete that the first time she appears, on a TV screen, I thought, "Oh, OK, on TV they're using actual footage of Palin," until I searched the face more carefully and found traces of Julianneness.

The film is based on a book that in notably unsympathetic to Palin, and you can certainly see why McCain's people found her impossible, yet there's a complexity and--dare I say it?--humanity that makes her story of a sincere if loony ideologue in way above her head trainwreck-fascinating.