Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (2011)

Directed by: Nick Broomfield

This documentary begins with an unsuccessful attempt by Broomfield to get an interview with Palin herself, and returns to the attempt a few times over the 90 minutes running time.  The amount of time spent on this is one of two weaknesses with the film, the other, more serious one, being an increasingly obvious partisanship on the film-maker’s part.

Dividing his time between Palin’s home state of Alaska, and stops on the road around the US at rallies and book-signings (plus a brief foray to Egypt to interview an old school-friend of Palin) Broomfield makes a reasonably convincing case for the view that Palin is prone to vindictive, bitter feuds, and for her anti-intellectualism.  But he spends relatively little time on either a dissection of her views on big political issues, or on the many gaffs and stumbles that would indicate what sort of intelligence and insight she might bring to Washington.   

Instead, he makes it easy for those who support Sarah Palin to claim that he was aiming for what her father calls a hit piece, especially at the end when he interrupts a staged Q&A at a rally to ask, ineffectively, a provocative, angry-sounding question about the state of her career.

Not terrible, but something of a missed opportunity.