Fair game

Few American moviegoers were interested in watching the fact-based political thriller based on the memoir written by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, Fair Game. The book was subtitled My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, and it's hard to imagine why any movie-maker thought its anti-Republican and anti-Iraq-war stances would resonate in the way that previous genre products (All The President's Men, especially) had done. A cynic would suspect that, after that saga, many Americans expect their government to lie, spin, and betray its employees.

A crucial mis-casting was expecting NZ-born Naomi Watts to carry a serious message and truly diabolical storyboard. She doesn't have the gravitas or charisma of a Streep or Jolie, and wore such fetching trouser suits and make-up that her claimed successes in the field for the CIA didn't look feasible. The real Plame (shown testifying to Congress during the end credits) looked a much tougher operative and Washington fighter.

Sean Penn is an active Hollywood radical fighter, taking a secondary starring role as Plame's self-opinionated husband, former career diplomat, French-speaking ambassador Joe Wilson, whose past postings in Africa led to his special assignment to investigate a supposed sale of uranium from Niger to Saddam's Iraq. His subsequent autobiography (The Politics of Truth) provided a complementary second source for the screenplay, written by British brothers Jeremy ("Jez") and John-Henry Butterworth.

Jez has won many awards for his Royal Court Theatre stage plays (including Mojo, filmed by him, and Jerusalem), but libel lawyers must have been vetting the scripts scrupulously to ensure that no one in Dick Cheney's offices or the CIA could sue. So Cheney is not given a role. Instead, bizarrely-named Scooter Libby, his chief of staff and fall guy (whom departing President George W Bush reportedly refused to pardon) is portrayed as an awesome Machiavellian politico, a plum character part for David Andrews.

There are many minor characters in Washington and in Iraq, where Plame was seeking answers to questions about Saddam's nuclear ambitions. The tale of one scientist's US-resident sister may all be true but it felt like a melodramatic device to bolster Plame's case that the White House's petty betrayal of her endangered many more agents than Plame herself.

The Cheney team's vindictive response to Wilson's refusal to support the Niger fiction is one proven historical footnote to the Iraq invasion (and a long-lasting slur on the reputation of the Washington Post). It is a symptomatic, microcosmic example of the determination of neo-cons (and other oil-avaricious war-mongers, including many outside the Republican regime) to confirm their self-interested delusions. It could have been a disturbing docudrama, but it falls flat, as a thriller, a study of marital stress, an insight into Washington's fears and failures, or a story of revenge (from Plame and her husband too).

Failure must be credited above all, even Watts, to director Doug Liman, best known as the director of the first film in the Bourne franchise (after which all concerned apparently agreed that Liman should stick to his day job as a producer). He also failed to make screen magic for Mr & Mrs Smith, despite having Pitt and Jolie (and their off-screen love life) to carry it into box offices globally. With Fair Game, its producers (including Zucker family members) possibly got him cheap, so they also let him amuse himself as cinematographer (for only the third time in his career, and the first time on a major feature). The end result includes far too much hand-held camera jerkiness and visual tedium.

Liman's production expertise may have helped to create a product that cost only US$22 million. It grossed less than half that in North America, and must be banking on good DVD sales. It doesn't warrant them, not for a characterless, scrappy, disjointed piece of real politic.