It’s seven years late, but Hollywood’s dramatic take on the “Plame affair” is finally here.
Maybe you’ll remember this shameful story from 2003, when Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Dick Cheney, illegally divulged the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media.
But if not, don’t worry. “Fair Game” is full of helpful, if awkwardly delivered background to the scandal, in which everybody spends the first half of the film “casually” dropping encyclopedic facts related to weapons-grade uranium and Sunni-Shia relations.
If by the end of that half you haven’t figured out that Plame is a valuable CIA agent being punished by an unscrupulous Bush administration for her husband’s public criticism of the falsified justifications for the war in Iraq, then you have highly selective hearing.
Important though the recounting of Plame’s victimization is, this adaptation has its problems. There is far too much pseudo-hidden exposition for the story to gracefully unfold. On the same note, the suffocating political overtone often makes the film resemble a bully pulpit being chucked through the air in the desperate attempt to approximate a plot arc
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But ultimately, the good outweighs the bad. Naomi Watts as Plame and Sean Penn as Plame’s slightly narcissistic whistle-blowing husband Joe Wilson both steal the show with lead performances. In fact, lame lines aside, all the actors are adept, with special mention for David Andrews as an existentially nauseating Scooter Libby.
Director Doug Liman, who is also director of photography, uses handheld cameras to great effect, capturing the neurosis Plame suffers in her exposed civilian life. This allows us to understand the human costs of the Bush administration’s unforgivable politiking.
From a flawed screenplay, Liman manages to blend elements of espionage thriller, war film and political/domestic drama with relative ease and success. I can only hope he turns his next lens to last summer’s Russian spy ring in Manhattan. What a movie that would be.
