Underlining and bolding his talking points with earsplitting soundtrack flourishes, aggressive montage, and an overall state of high anxiety, the
filmmaker creates an exhausting, repetitive journey into Palinland. This sort of town-crier tactic—"Wake up America, we’re going to hell," is
the general attitude—is consistent with the message promulgated by Bannon’s heroine. On some level, many Americans of all political stripes
agree with it. But when that notion is seeped so resolutely into the core of a movie, it makes for a headache-inducing experience.
Imbued with an apparently low opinion of his audience’s ability to infer things, Bannon lays everything out in the plainest possible terms. A
discussion of wasteful spending is peppered with an intercut image of a dollar bill burning up. An angry electorate is transformed into bickering,
preening stock extras, seemingly drawn from the world’s worst fashion catalogue. The movie employs jump cuts with such
urgency—transitioning from the empty pronouncements of its talking heads (more on that later) to blips of archival footage punctuated by
superfluous illustrations and back again—that the substance of Palin’s story is lost, having fallen victim to a visual avalanche.
The weirdly grandiose, martial tone is enhanced by Bannon’s garish soundtrack choices. Ominous sounds percolate amid a foreboding swirl of
nighttime snow. Consistently driving drum beats emphasize the power and might of the saintly main figure. It often sounds as if Bannon intends to
aurally compete with the ear-shattering summer blockbusters being screened next door. Joe Leydon, writing in Variety, puts it best: “[it’s] the sort of thunderous music one normally hears only in
movies when astronauts are preparing to blow up meteors.”
The mistakes aren’t limited to this sort of bombast. While Palin did not directly participate in the doc, Bannon makes the fundamental
miscalculation of using her audiobook recitation of her memoir Going Rogue: An American Life as narration. Her sing-songy voice, which has
that unfortunate ever-so-slightly condescending bedtime story ring to it, is not well suited to a form that demands the ability to tell a tale with
conversational authority. This isn’t, to be sure, Palin’s fault. Her tone works for an audiobook, when she’s functionally a stand-in
for the reader. But if Bannon had studied the cadences and intonations employed by Morgan Freeman, David McCullough, and others who have mastered the
art of film narration, he’d have quickly seen that the two styles don’t really overlap.
Finally, Bannon corrals an impressive assemblage of talking heads, from Bruce to publisher Andrew Breitbart and talk-show host Mark Levin, who repeat
their same basic thoughts (centered on what Tina Dupuy correctly deemed “GOP dog whistles”) over and over again. Palin is “like a
marine.” She takes on the “elites.” She understands “real” Americans because she’s a “mama
grizzly”/“hockey mom”/“pitbull with lipstick.” Generally, each expert speaks with the anger and righteous indignation of
a person scorned, but it’s never entirely clear what these privileged, successful individuals have to be so incensed about. The filmmaker would
have done well to rein things in a bit, particularly when Breitbart undercuts the entire Palin-as-feminist-icon premise of the picture by excoriating
the male politicians who never defended her from criticism as “eunuchs.”
