Movie Review: Fair Game

This is the Oscar contender that wasn't: a torn from the headlines political expose starring heavyweights Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

Not to be confused with the Cindy Crawford flick - or indeed, that cult item in which Trudie Styler is terrorized by a black mamba - with a screenplay by Brits Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and Doug Bourne Identity Liman in the director's chair, Fair Game has all the right credentials. But somehow this genuinely outrageous true story doesn't have the impact it should.

That's not to say it isn't worth your time, especially if your memory of the Valerie Plame case is a little hazy. In July 2003, Plame – who actually looks a lot like Naomi Watts – was outed as a CIA spy by her own government, specifically Scooter Libby, who worked in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Why? Because her husband, Joe Wilson (Penn), a former US ambassador to Niger, wrote an article in the New York Times complaining that intelligence he provided had been misrepresented by the Bush administration to stoke fears of Saddam Hussein's non-existent nuclear weapons program. By exposing Plame, they hoped to undermine Wilson and distract the media – as well as serve notice to anyone else considering taking a stand against the Iraq invasion.

Comparisons with Liman's Bourne movie don't get us very far, though both are stories about an American spy betrayed from above. The opening scene sketches a field operation that does smack of cloak and dagger, but mostly Plame does her work at a desk, in front of a computer screen. Even without the action heroics, she's a distinctly passive heroine. Sean Penn takes a more dynamic role as Wilson, refusing to back down and taking on the administration in a duel waged over the airwaves and in the op-ed pages of the nation's newspapers. While Joe fights back, Valerie withdraws to suffer in silence – or, if you prefer, safe-guards the well-being of her family and her children.

What's most interesting here is that the movie doesn't entirely take Joe's side. Wilson's crusade against the administration may be morally correct, but there are more than hints in Penn's performance that self-righteousness and aggrieved male pride play their part in his motivation.

Both stars (costars in 21 Grams, let's not forget) are completely convincing, but still it's hard not to feel that Watts is under-utilized, while Penn is so firmly in his comfort zone the film loses some of its edge. Photographed, rather glumly, by Liman himself (not in the ADD style of the Bourne pictures), Fair Game is workmanlike, but dry and predictable.

Perhaps the idea of government corruption is not as shocking as it was back in the 1970s, the heyday of the conspiracy thriller. Or maybe, the film's revelations are just too familiar: anyone who doesn't know that the Bush administration propagandized the case for war can't have been paying even the slightest attention.

A more challenging and relevant movie might have focused on Scooter Libby and probed the convictions that drove him to obstruct justice and commit perjury (Libby was subsequently convicted on these counts but his sentence was commuted by President Bush). As it is, David Andrews lights a fuse under the movie with his bracingly unapologetic performance in a couple of barbed, aggressive scenes, but Liman doesn't follow through, and Fair Game feels a bit lop-sided as a result.

That's not to suggest the Wilsons were anything but victims in this tawdry affair, just that on this evidence, they're not all that interesting.