It's a lot easier to anger up the blood than it is to dramatize politically motivated federal tort claims. (I’m pretty sure that’s straight out of Aristotle.)
Doug Liman’s Fair Game will make you want to take a time machine back to 2004 to try and prevent the Bush Administration’s reelection, but will a novice wonk really understand what the heck is going on? More importantly, will the film’s heart and soul, the marriage between Naomi Watts’ Valerie Plame and Sean Penn’s Joseph Wilson, have any dramatic weight? The answer, and I consider it a good one considering the difficulty of the project, is “for the most part.”
The first half of Fair Game is absolutely rock solid, and Watts is spectacular as a real life spook, zipping around the globe under false identities. Sean Penn lets his guard down a bit and plays Wilson as a bit of a crank. There are hints that he’s a business failure and social misfit – indeed, there’s a nice twist on Hitchcock’s bomb-under-the-table where the bomb is knowing that the dinner hosts have informed opinions on WMD.
Fair Game bluntly states that the Robert Novak article outing Plame is directly responsible for the death of a family of nice Iraqis who “trusted America.” It may be true, but it has the subtlety of a cricket bat to the temple, and signals a distinctive turn in the film.
Once the “Plame Affair” is in full swing, the film’s focus is that on the Wilson family marriage and that, frankly, isn’t as interesting as the internal machinations of intelligence gathering. Watts and Penn perform admirably, and their scenes of breakdown aren’t bad, they simply just don't measure up.
I followed the Plame story quite closely back in the day, but I attended Fair Game with someone who did not. Through their eyes, the film does a good job of making you irate at the misuse of power, but the nuances of what exactly went down, and, more importantly, why, is missing.
