In Fair Game, director Doug Liman and screenwriters Jez and John Henry Butterworth do a brisk, able job of recapping the 2003 Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame affair—in this version, Naomi Watts plays Plame, Sean Penn plays her outraged husband Joe Wilson, and David Andrews plays Libby, a man whose perfidy might have faded from the public memory were it not for his ridiculous Muppet Show nickname. (Disappointingly, Robert Novak, the journalist who cavalierly blew Plame’s cover as a CIA operative in his newspaper column, aided by leaks from the White House, does not appear onscreen.)It’s always bracing to be freshly reminded of the moral bankruptcy of the Bush White House, but the parts of Fair Game I found most intriguing were the scenes that give you an idea of just what a job at the CIA actually entails—Plame’s position, for instance, appears to have required her to be part researcher, part diplomat, and part bodyguard… all the while existing within a culture that seems to regard this incredible combination of skills as not just mundane and commonplace, but ultimately disposable. I don’t know if Fair Game gives you much insight into Valerie Plame’s inner life—whether she was motivated by patriotism, a taste for adventure, or some need to constantly prove herself to herself—but you do come away admiring how such an extraordinary person managed to project such an aura of ordinariness to her circle of friends.
Did Joe Wilson ever marvel at his wife as he lay in bed beside her or watched her across the breakfast table? I’m sure he must have, but Fair Game is very sharp in the way that it suggests that Wilson’s motive for writing the New York Times op-ed piece doubting the veracity of President Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger—the article that put him and his wife in the White House’s line of fire—as well as making the dozens of media appearances in the months that followed, may have been in part a simple craving for attention, a desire to feel as important and effective a figure on the world stage as he knew his wife was. No longer would he be an obscure former ambassador doing speaking engagements before audiences of two dozen people at best, trying to keep his struggling consulting business solvent, but a crusader for justice. In this sense, Wilson is a good role for Sean Penn, one that mirrors Penn’s seeming real-life inability to recognize how often his own political rhetoric comes off as strident and self-aggrandizing.
Liman and the Butterworths never do state conclusively whether they think Libby, Karl Rove, and Richard Armitage outed Plame as a petty fly-flicking act of revenge—something they did simply because they could (and figured they could get away with it)—or if it was deliberately intended to create a chilling effect among anybody else contemplating breaking ranks with the president. Instead, the Libby/Rove scenes mostly consist of the actors exchanging sinister looks with each other and letting the audience fill in the blanks. It’s a very small-scale film, made on what was evidently a small budget. As a result of this narrow scope, you come away thinking that what upset the filmmakers the most about the Plame affair is that it nearly broke up Plame and Wilson’s marriage, not what it symbolized about the White House’s lack of respect for the law. Still, they do let Wilson/Penn get in a pointed dig when he describes Saddam as a man who would rather kill a friend by mistake than let a potential enemy to live and remarks that to him, that’s the definition of a monster. When Penn finishes that line, Liman cuts to an image of a world leader giving a speech on a TV screen. But it’s not Saddam we see.
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