Rating: ***
One of the great assets to Doug Liman’s Fair Game is how ably and subtly he’s able to rewind the clock back to 2003. Here and now, the idea of going to Iraq to displace a dictator that had absolutely zero to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2011is ludicrous. A tragic act of executive hubris where bad decision making followed bad intelligence. Support for the Iraq War, and trying to find someone who will admit that they did, is a little like trying to now find fans of O-Town, 98 Degrees, and the other inter-changeable boy bands that were on the radio at the time.
There’s a scene in the second half of Fair Game where Ambassador Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn) is meeting some businessmen. He excuses himself to use the washroom and when he returns to the table, an irate woman is explaining to his clients about how Wilson, having called into question the Bush Administration’s justification for war in a New York Times op-ed, is a traitor, and other awful things. At this point, Wilson is close to his wit’s end; he’s been labelled a pariah, his wife Valerie Plame has been outed as a CIA agent in seemingly retaliation, and his business meeting has been ruined by someone who bought the party line. There’s such electricity to that scene, the emotion runs over, and you can feel Wilson’s frustration to the core. It’s such an energizing scene and the pity is that you wish that energy could have translated through the rest of the movie.
Based on books by both Wilson and Plame, Liman’s film is a rather under-stated and fair-minded re-enactment of the scandal that, at the time, only slightly derailed the George W. Bush White House, but nonetheless laid the ground work for its eventual downfall on all matters concerning Iraq. In terms of story, the film is almost distant and unemotional. It’s tactful in saying, or rather not saying, where in lays the fault of ruining a good woman’s career and discrediting her and her husband. At heart though, and there is a heart, it’s about how two distinguished people deal with fact they’re nearly ruined for the sake of political inconvenience.
Penn as Wilson and Naomi Watts as Plame are both really well cast and are more than up to the challenges. Penn particularly amazed me for managing to downplay his innate Sean Penn-ness, toning down the persona and playing Wilson very straight without any added demagoguery or big speech moments. There’s just the frustration of a man whose own word and integrity is called into question, and the fact that doesn’t sit well with him. Watts as Plame is the model of civility. Her reaction to being outed as a CIA officer is to cover herself. The mere admission of her status means the worst possible damage of all has already been done. She’s a career woman that loses her career, or rather has it taken away. It’s stolen, but with all her skill, there’s nothing she can do to get it back. What use is a covert operative whose face everybody knows?
Technically, the film is well made, although there were a few scenes that felt that Liman was trying too hard to duplicate his style from The Bourne Identity. Of course real life spy games are not the same as cinematic ones, and to me this was one of the more interesting aspects of Fair Game, seeing the real, almost mundane, facets of intelligence gathering. Liman paints well the difficulty in getting absolute facts in the murky world we live in, and how that difficulty was compounded by a government with an agenda and a minimum standard to meet for war.
On that account, the film tells the story in a very straightforward manner, and I would say emotionlessly as well. I imagine the point was to be as unbiased as possible, but the fact is that this is a personal story, told from the perspective of the people involved most intimately in it, and the point is that there should be more fire to the story and the way it’s told. The performances by Penn and Watts nearly sell it, but I think that the film starts too soon, and ends too early in the timeline of events. It felt like the story wasn’t over, and while there was some kind of resolution it was neither emotional nor political.
The strong performances do win out slightly though, but the dynamics of the debate and the lack of a forceful voice is kind of concerning. This isn’t an occasion where we have to skate on thin ice around the subject, for it is know pretty well known that a lot of people in the White House did a lot of bad stuff to fight a war on specious evidence. There was no call for such a soft touch, and one can be fair to both sides without treating them both with kid gloves. On second thought, maybe Fair Game lives up to its name in an unexpected way.
