Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.One of the first memorable things you see in Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, Nick Broomfield's flat, repetitive fizzle of a gotcha documentary is the filmmaker himself, clad in a bright red-and-black hunting jacket crunching through the Alaskan snow, in search of his prey. There isn't much else that is memorable in the film which is of Broomfield and his co-director Joan Churchill's doing, though. It's a clattering stream of media from other sources strung together by Broomfield's hapless seeking of a sit-down with the governor herself and interviews with axe-grinders. That many of them have completely legitimate issues to air with the former governor is utterly disserved by Broomfield's unprofessional approach. Broomfield has long made himself the center of his work. In them, he tends to cast himself as the hapless naïf, trying to get anybody to talk to him with his gentle, nonthreatening British accent and giant fuzzy overhead microphone. The attempt of trying to make a film, chasing down elusive sources and pondering out loud about what the film is even about becomes the film itself. Here, Broomfield uses that device to the exclusion of almost anything else, since he apparently never quite found his aesthetic or journalistic purpose behind shooting the thing in the first place.
Sarah Palin: You Betcha! doesn't start out as any kind of hit job. Broomfield pals around in chummy fashion in Wasilla, talking to people who just love Palin to pieces. He even gets in to talk with her parents, the Heaths. Nothing much comes of these interviews, since they're just stopoffs on his way to the heart of the matter: the long train of people with grievances who want to talk about them on camera. That there are so many of them, ranging from former classmates to one-time government appointees of hers, almost proves Broomfield's point more so than anything they have to say.
For anybody who has read the dispatches out of little Wasilla in the past few years, there is nothing much to be said here that will surprise anyone. For those who haven't, they might find it of interest to hear about Palin's purportedly vindictive streak that is claimed to lead her to see enemies everywhere and to eventually scapegoat and fire many of her close advisers and co-workers. A pastor who has had run-ins with Palin's supporters (some of whom have a habit of sending death threats to all those who oppose her or her politics) talks about the apocalyptic fantasia believed as truth by followers of her church. Broomfield's narrative, intercut with his occasional attempt to get a sit-down with Palin herself - her assurance "You Betcha!" being as close as he's able to get.
There is one true reporting get here, and that is an interview with Mike Wooten, the trooper behind the "Trooper Gate" scandal (in which Palin, as governor, supposedly spent months and thousands of man-hours trying to get Wooten fired after he divorced Palin's sister). But even here, Broomfield doesn't get much out of Mike, just more verification of everything that has been said previously about the governor's vendettas and lack of interest in the actual business of governing.
Although Broomfield makes some noise in the film's later segments about what a frightening prospect Palin would have been in the White House, he doesn't bother covering the most dramatic moment in this narrative, when the former pageant queen and small-town mayor is promoted from governor to vice-presidential candidate during the 2008 campaign. There is a wincingly honest phone diatribe from former McCain staff-member Steve Schmidt on what a disastrously unqualified and downright unpleasant person Palin was, it just highlights the negative narrative that Palin's parents seem convinced early on that Broomfield might be trying to do. By mostly ignoring the presidential campaign which brought Palin to national prominence, and releasing the film so long after her political and celebrity star has faded, Broomfield forces viewers to wonder: why did he bother?
