GRADE: B+

MINI REVIEW: This docudrama, an explosive exposé of the heady lead up to the Iraq War (based on Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson’s memoirs), is a detailed, habitually accurate and surprisingly moving film.

Directed by: Doug Liman

Starring: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Sam Shepard, Ty Burrell, Bruce McGill, Michael Kelly, Brooke Smith, David Denman

Rated PG-13 for some language.

Running Time: 106 minutes

FULL REVIEW

Doug Liman is one of the more eclectic directors working today. He made his stamp on Hollywood with the indie comedy “Swingers,” launched the “Bourne” franchise with “The Bourne Identity” and conjured magic with the entertaining, tongue in cheek spy caper “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Now he’s taken on history in the docudrama “Fair Game,” an explosive exposé of the heady lead up to the Iraq War, based on Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson’s memoirs. The result is a detailed, habitually accurate and surprisingly moving film. Like the documentary “The Tillman Story” earlier this summer, you will likely leave “Fair Game” angry.

Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame, an undercover agent assigned to the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division combing Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Simultaneously, her husband, ambassador Joe Wilson, was attempting to verify a British intelligence claim that the Iraqis had recently purchased enriched yellow cake uranium from Niger, the primary element in constructing an atomic weapon. When the Bush White House began beating the drums of war without a shred of solid evidence (indeed, the administration was cherry picking the data to support their claims while ignoring evidence glaringly contrary to their claims), Wilson took it upon himself to pen a New York Times editorial denouncing them. In what became a game of schoolboy reciprocity writ large, the Bush Administration retaliated by blowing Plame’s cover and outing her to the world.

“Fair Game’s” locus is, at first, unapparent and was, throughout the actual events, equally overlooked—it is not an international or even national drama but a domestic one. Few of us reading our newspapers ever paused to peer beneath the text to the inevitable maelstrom that must have been ignited in Plame and Wilson’s home. It was easy to see them as a resolute pair, standing staunchly together in the face of tyranny. What “Fair Game” reveals is the terrific strain the events took on the couple’s marriage, warping it even the point of disintegration. We get the impression that when Wilson thumbs his nose at the most powerful office on the planet, he does so not only because, as “Rob Roy” tells us, “Honor is the gift a man gives himself,” but also because the male ego is often incapable of accurately evaluating the size of either dog in the fight. At what point does national security trump personal vindication? Wilson fights the right fight for what very well may be the wrong reasons.

If “Fair Game” struggles, it is with a fundamental, nearly fatal flaw. For all but a few minutes of the film’s running time, Watt’s Plame is passive, reactionary and inert. While this stance is perhaps historically accurate (Plame tried to lie low in the hope that the publicity wouldn’t endanger her many overseas contacts, and when that became impossible, was stymied in her public response both by her oaths to the CIA and her imprudent but ferocious loyalty to a government that did not reciprocate in kind), it makes for lousy drama. She is hard to rally behind given her almost total submissiveness. This narrative speed bump is overcome thanks to Penn’s passionate and vitriolic defense of his and his wife’s innocence. But it has the unfortunate side effect of shifting the balance of power. As in nature, cinema abhors a vacuum, and Penn, who is an undisputedly integral character but arguably not its center, takes over as the film’s lead.

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