Movie Review: Fair Game

DRAMA

FAIR GAME (Summit)

STARS > Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Michael Kelly, Sam Shepard

DIRECTOR > Doug Liman

RATING > [3/5]

OPENS > NOV 5 (limited), NOV 19 (nationwide)

A movie about a middle-aged D.C. power-couple almost getting divorced probably seems a little outside of AP's target demographic, but if you’re at all politically minded, Fair Game just might be worth your time. In it, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) dramatizes the highly publicized real-life plight of retired ambassador Joseph Wilson (Penn) and his wife, former covert CIA-operative Valerie Plame (Watts), in the wake of the yellowcake uranium debacle that the last Bush administration used as its main excuse to go to war with Iraq. In fact, the film is based on the couple’s memoirs—Wilson’s The Politics Of Truth and Plame’s Fair Game.

The short version of the story goes like this: In early 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to investigate a claim that Iraq intended to buy a large quantity of yellowcake uranium powder from Niger to “reconstitute” its (Iraq’s) nuclear program.  If the allegation turned out to be true, of course, the Bush administration would have what it viewed as a perfectly valid reason to invade Iraq. When Wilson returned and reported that the claim was “unequivocally wrong,” Bush and his cronies deliberately ignored him and went to war anyway. Outraged, Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed piece calling bullshit on the administration. The White House punished him by leaking Plame’s identity to arch-asshole and neo-con cheerleader Robert Novak, who outed her in the Washington Post.

Fair Game dramatizes all of the foregoing political intrigue while highlighting its near-devastating effect on Wilson and Plame’s marriage. Both Penn and Watts are superb in their roles, like that’s a surprise. As two of the finest actors working today, the care (and, apparently, accuracy) with which they play their real-life counterparts is admirable. Meanwhile, Liman keeps the film from getting bogged down in the minutiae of a sprawling political scandal. At 106 minutes, it’s still a taut political thriller, even though we know how it ends.

That production on Fair Game began just three months after Bush left office speaks to the highly vindictive nature of the retribution that our ex-president and his administration routinely doled out to their enemies—the exact kind of retribution that this film examines. After all, the facts of this particular case have been public knowledge for years now. What’s shocking is that the war in Iraq continues even though it’s been proven—and even widely acknowledged—that the U.S. had no good reason to fight in the first place. At its core, Fair Game serves as an excellent and, sadly, much-needed reminder of how we got into this mess.