Starring: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn
Directed By: Doug Liman
Written By: Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on books by Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame
Produced By: Jez Butterworth, Akiva Goldsman, Janet Zucker, Jerry Zucker
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 108 minutes
Website: fairgame-movie.com
Budget: $22,000,000
Genre: Drama
Release Date: November 19, 2010
Nobody knows anything. If there’s a lesson to be taken away from Fair Game – most definitely not to be confused with the 1995 Cindy Crawford action film of the same name – it’s that. Whether or not that refers to Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, the CIA, the media, the filmmakers, the government, or any combination of the above is up to the viewer.
It should all be pretty familiar to anyone who was alive and near a TV all those eons ago, in a savage, distant time called 2003. Valerie Plame (here played by The Ring’s Naomi Watts) was a covert CIA operative until she was publically revealed as an undercover agent by a high-ranking official in the Bush Administration. Much ink was spilled and heads rolled as all parties were quick to point fingers of blame and political gamesmanship. The Administration accused Plame and her CIA cohorts of incompetence and dishonesty; Plame and her supporters accused the Administration of leaking her name in retaliation for a damning op-ed piece in the New York Times by Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), which embarrassed President Bush and undermined the rationale for the Iraq war.
If any of that description made you bristle either for or at Plame and Wilson, then you’re likely to have a response to Fair Game, based on separate memoirs by Plame and Wilson, which dramatizes their experiences during the scandal. Shot with shaky, hand-held intimacy by the increasingly diverse director Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity, Jumper), Fair Game isn’t quite the incendiary polemic politically-minded viewers might have dreaded/hoped for. It’s a movie with a point of view, based on the source material, and has more in common with a police procedural than James Bond (Wilson himself laments this after his momentous fact-finding mission to Niger). The movie spends a lot of time unloading exposition in big, unwieldy chunks. Acronyms fly, paperwork is reviewed, and crash courses in nuclear fission and African political disputes are offered. It confirms one of the great suspicions of movie glamour: spying is actually pretty boring.
That’s an overstatement, of course, but there are long, dry stretches throughout this movie as necessary information is ladled out to the audience. In this way, Fair Game is much like similarly labyrinthine political dramas like Syriana. There’s a lot of information to follow, and not all of it can be processed in a two-hour running time. But if the movie’s a bit dry at times there are moments where, divorced from its political underpinnings, it shines in its moments of family drama. It’s safe to infer that Plame and Wilson are both passionate, stubborn people, and their reticence and determination enlivens a movie brimming with stern faces and serious men sitting across from each other at desks. Watts and Penn give it that spark in their performances – Watts with internalized panic and Penn with his usual showy panache.
It culminates with the Plame-Wilson family at a crisis point and Penn giving an impassioned speech to a group of students about the importance of truth and calling those in power to task. It’s typically histrionic Penn, this movie’s equivalent of the Big Courtroom Speech, but the message matters. Conservatives will roll their eyes at this, as it contextually pertains to the Bush Administration, but those same viewers would no doubt cheer it if it referred to Obama. Likewise, more liberal viewers might view the scene – and the movie as a whole – the opposite way. Penn as Wilson rallies mightily for the truth, but in an increasingly divisive political climate, “truth” comes down more than ever to perception. Nobody knows anything. Come to Fair Game as a drama, and it works; come to it with an ax to grind or a flag to wave and results may vary.
Grade: 3 stars
