Nick Broomfield, with a cardboard cutout of Sarah Palin, in his movie, "Sarah Palin: You Betcha!"Sometimes old journalists will get together and talk about "How I got that story." Which inspired the iconoclastic New Journalists to pioneer a form you might call "How I didn't get that story."
Gay Talese wrote the best one, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" -- an article about not getting an interview. With its wealth of detail, it ended up telling us more about its subject than any normal profile could.
Nick Broomfield, however, is not Gay Talese.
Broomfield, a deceptively deferential Brit, is a documentarian who chooses topics he knows people don't want to talk about. Then he makes their not talking about it the real subject.
It's a gimmick, and it's getting old.
In "Sarah Palin: You Betcha!" the subject is -- well, you can guess. And you can also guess the reception the documentarian and his tiny crew get when they arrive in Wasilla.
Palin's parents welcome him in at first -- until they find out who else he's talking to. Then the access ends.
But it's not that he's trying to do a hit piece, he protests. It's just that her friends won't speak to him. And apparently it's not hard to find enemies -- most of whom paint the same picture of ruthless ambition, casual lies and petty yet vicious feuds.
None of this, however -- "Troopergate," the gossip about possible drug use and affairs, her preference for grandstanding over governing -- is particularly new.
We've seen it all before -- and in better stock footage than the clips that Broomfield and co-director Sarah Churchill have cobbled together from lord-knows-where (many of them still have obscuring, "Viewing Copy" watermarks).
It's all nastily entertaining, but shallow at best. Far more interesting would be to really dig into what Palin did in Alaska, a lot of which -- selling bonds and raising taxes to pay for a sports complex, lobbying for federal funds for that "bridge to nowhere" -- actually flies in the face of the conservatism she espouses nationally.
But, like his subject, Broomfield prefers flash to facts.
The film is interspersed with him ambushing Palin at book signings, trying to get her to commit to an interview. By the end he's reduced to standing in an emptying hall, yelling questions at people's backs as they walk away.
But what did he expect? It's a bit like his old film "Kurt & Courtney," in which he suggested that Kurt Cobain was murdered, and that his widow was involved. (Again, Broomfield seemed genuinely surprised that she had no interest in talking to him.)
In truth, Broomfield seems like a pleasant enough fellow, or at least he fakes it very well. His "Battle For Haditha" -- a dramatic re-enactment of an awful firefight in Iraq that cast real soldiers as its real soldiers -- is still worth seeing, and studying.
But "Sarah Palin: You Betcha!" is little more than an occasionally amusing joke.
And it's clear its punch line was written first.
Ratings note: The film contains some strong language.
Directed by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill. Now playing in New York.
TWO STARS