FAIR GAME (2010) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Doug Liman
Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, David Andrews,
Bruce McGill, Sam Shepard, Liraz Charhi
In 2002, the CIA sent retired diplomat Joseph Wilson to Africa to investigate the alleged link between uranium coming from Niger and Iraq's nuclear weapons program. What Wilson found there was - nothing. That wasn't what the hawks in the Bush Administration wanted to hear, so they faked the intelligence and went to war anyway. When Wilson blew the whistle in the New York Times, the Bush people struck back, outing Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover agent, and doing everything possible to smear both of them. There's a good movie to be made from that story, maybe along the lines of "Three Days of the Condor", or "All the President's Men", or even "In the Loop", and "Fair Game" is not that movie. It's overstated and melodramatic, with too much of the focus on the Wilsons' marriage, and not enough on the role of guys like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney in a plot that probably should have landed them in prison. To its credit, the movie doesn't sanctify the Wilsons, either. Joe is his own worst enemy, a knowledgeable and conscientious foreign service veteran who talks too much. Plame's primary obsession is her job, not her family. She's constantly slipping out of the house at odd hours, going on unannounced trips "to Cleveland," leaving Joe and the kids to carry on without her. He enjoys the spotlight in a way his wife doesn't, and the public attention he attracts as he makes his case puts her work and even their lives in peril. Once her cover is blown, her covert career is over. Penn and Watts are good playing the Wilsons - you expect that - but they're stuck with the heavy end of the script. The most convincing performances are in the supporting roles, the actors playing Plame's bureaucratic colleagues at Langley, and especially David Andrews as Cheney's loyal henchman and eventual fall guy, Scooter Libby. That only Libby took the rap in the Wilson affair shows how much our top-level government criminals have learned since Watergate. Maybe history will straighten that out someday. We can only hope.
