Director Doug Liman, who gave us the millennial reboot of the amnesiac assassin in The Bourne Identity (2002), gave us a glamorous view of marriage in the sizzling hot Mr. and Mrs. Smith . Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt burnt up the screen playing a married couple who are assassins with no idea about their better halves' secret identity.
Liman's latest, Fair Game , about Valerie Plame, a CIA covert operative, is at its most effective when studying the stresses and strains of a modern marriage. Based on Palme's memoir, “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,” and her husband, Joe C. Wilson's memoir, “The Politics of Truth,” the movie tells the story of the events of 2003 when Palme's cover in the CIA was blown in a newspaper article.
Palme's husband, Joe C. Wilson, a former ambassador, is sent by the Vice President's office to Niger to investigate claims of Iraq buying uranium to build nuclear weapons. Wilson, who has worked in Niger before, after due investigation submits a report of there being no sale of uranium to Iraq.
However, in his State of Union address in 2003, President Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” After America went to war with Iraq, Wilson wrote an article in the New York Times , “What I didn't find in Africa.” Soon after, columnist Robert Novak identified Palme as a CIA operative in his column — a revelation which puts several missions and covert operatives at risk.
Palme's outing also pushes an already shaky marriage to the brink. While Mr. and Mrs. Smith was all games, guns and glamour, Fair Game takes a different look at marriage and experiments with truth. More than senate hearings, it is the intimate conversations on the kitchen table and in parks with the children's excited squeals forming an effective background score that underline the heart of the movie.
The film is blessed with strong writing, smooth pacing and excellent acting. Naomi Watts is luminescent, fragile and tough as nails as the realistic Palme who effortlessly juggles the roles of hi-flying career woman, mother to twins and wife, while the changeful Sean Penn loses himself in the uncompromising, idealistic Wilson.
The film seems to have taken creative liberties at least according to The Washington Post which has described the film as being “full of distortions — not to mention outright inventions.”
The movie is engrossing for its thesis on truth. For a movie on an abstraction, it is riveting stuff and incidentally, conspiracy theorists will totally love it.
Fair Game
Genre: Drama/thriller
Director: Doug Liman
Cast: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn
Storyline: Bio pic of covert CIA operative, Valerie Palme, whose identity was exposed thanks to some dirty government games
Bottomline: A taut, humane thriller
