Fair Game
Doug Liman’s compelling real-life thriller suffers from over-familiarity. Had we not already known as much as we do about the political games played by the Bush administration that led to the outing of former CIA operative, Valarie Plame Wilson, after her husband, Joe Wilson (a former ambassador to Niger), spoke out about the lies the administration spun that led us to war in Iraq, this film might have been a gripping bit of real-life espionage filmmaking. Make no mistake: Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”) keeps things moving at a fevered pitch, but knowing what we know now makes it hard to feel the tensions Wilson and Plame are feeling.
I could recount the story points that are already well-known to anyone who followed the events that led to Cheney’s chief of staff, L. Scooter Libby, outing Plame in the papers after Wilson (who had gone on a CIA-directed fact-finding mission to Niger to search out rumors of the sale of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium to Iraq for the purpose of nuclear proliferation and came back empty-handed) had taken the administration to task in the papers for their spin on the truth. But what ultimately holds our attention in “Fair Game” (based on the respective books by Plame and Wilson) are the marital tensions that flow through the story after Plame’s covert status is leaked. Liman (who shoots the film himself as cinematographer) keeps these scenes intimate and intense as Naomi Watts (a live-wire of strength and quiet anger as Plame) and Sean Penn (a less quiet voice for truth and a mouthpiece for a nation betrayed) show the harsh effects a public and political life can have on a marriage. In the end, the truth was discovered, and their marriage survived, but to glimpse a happy existence torn apart is a provocative and powerful experience from which Liman, Watts, and Penn do not shy away.
