“It’s rated X,” the director of the new Sarah Palin movie informs me as I sit down for an early screening of the biopic “The Undefeated.” I don’t know how I feel about this information. But I’m the first movie critic to see the film, so I sit back uneasily and hope I don’t have to witness any shower scenes starring John McCain.
The two-hour Palin movie, which writer-director Stephen Bannon plans to show in Iowa in a “Field of Dreams”-style cornfield, is getting a lot of attention as the former Alaska governor tours the East Coast.
Bannon promised the blog Big Hollywood, “This will go off like an atomic bomb” in the Republican primary season. Palin herself, Bannon says, gave the movie a big thumbs-up, though she didn’t participate in the making of the $1 million film. She appears in it only in news clips and is heard in audiobook clips from her memoir “Going Rogue.”
Relishing the attention as she mulled a presidential run, Palin last week swept through town on her “One Nation” bus tour. She had pizza with Donald Trump, then headed for New Hampshire on the same day Mitt Romney announced he was entering the race. She even snarked on Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan, calling the idea that government can force individuals to buy health care “not a good thing” and “a big challenge” for Romney to explain. Asked whether she could unseat President Obama, Palin said, “To put it concisely — yes.” Palin couldn’t have generated more excitement if she had called Anthony Weiner “my boyfriend” on her Twitter feed.
So what does all of this mean?
Not much, maybe.
While Palin draws an audience, backstage nothing is plugged in. She hasn’t hired the hacks and flacks pols need to run a campaign and has given no sign she is interested in giving up her Fox News contract.
These days Thomas Jefferson couldn’t get elected on name recognition alone, and while Palin may be her own breed, she knows that.
Moreover, “The Undefeated,” far from shaking up the race, is just a fan film from an outsider hitching a ride on her fame, hoping that attention from political reporters in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina will provide a springboard for a national release.
This would-be “Fairbanks 9/11” certainly blazes with passion — hosannas of awe for Palin, brimstone of scorn for her detractors (especially Matt Damon, standup comics and anonymous commenters who say mean things on blogs).
But its tone is an excruciating combination of bombast and whining, it’s so outlandishly partisan that it makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln and its febrile rush of images — not excluding earthquakes, car wrecks, volcanic eruption and attacking Rottweilers — reminded me of the brainwash movie Alex is forced to sit through in “A Clockwork Orange.” Except no one came along to refresh my pupils with eyedrops.
I’d sooner have watched a Michael Moore movie.
Any Michael Moore movie.
Even “Canadian Bacon.”
If you’re hopeful (or worried) that this movie is the secret trigger for a Palin relaunch, don’t be. Even if you fixed the blaring soundtrack and took out all the symbols of the cataclysmic evil opposing Palin (barking dogs, disaster footage, a closeup of Rosie O’Donnell), you’d still be left with a hopeless sputtering jumble.
The busted logic and narrative chop of “The Undefeated” don’t suggest the phrase, “spirited new defense of Palin.” They say, “cyclone landed here.”
News clips of Palin’s tenure in Alaska as mayor of Wasilla, chair of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and governor are narrated solely by friends and allies. They keep telling us that she (a) adhered strictly to small-government, free-market conservative principles yet (b) used the full power of government to make people’s lives more splendid. For instance, Palin is said to be cutting both taxes and spending in Wasilla. Fine. A minute later she is credited with unleashing an economic boom there — by laying water and sewer lines and building roads that attracted national retailers. So which is it? Expansionist, or minimalist? Was she Wasilla’s FDR or Calvin Coolidge?
Similarly, as we learn about Alaska’s Survivalist Socialism — all the precious fuel in the ground belongs to the state; oil companies can only lease drilling rights — Palin is portrayed both as a free marketer and an antagonist of same who took on Big Oil by working with the Democrats to raise oil taxes.
In one scene, we’re told she didn’t care about polls; in the next, she’s bragging about her approval rating (88%). She says she doesn’t put much stock in such surveys — yet “I figured my administration must be doing something right.” So does her recent approval rating of 28% tell her that she must be doing something wrong?
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com