20/20 Filmsight - Film Criticism by David O'Connell

You have to feel a little sorry for Doug Liman. If there was ever an underappreciated filmmaker, it’s him. Liman directed The Bourne Identity and has since been almost forgotten for his hard work, Paul Greengrass picking up the camera (quite literally, it seemed) for the second and third instalments and careening away with all the glory.

It’s a pity because Liman’s a solid filmmaker, and The Bourne Identity is by some margin the best of its trilogy – perhaps the best modern spy film, full stop. But Liman now tends to be celebrated for his earlier, more indie efforts, particularly Swingers and Go.

Straight off the bat Fair Game shares an important similarity with those two early films in that Liman has gone back to handling his own cinematography. And his ‘worm’s-eye-view’ style hasn’t changed any, the filmmaker being a subtle and unobtrusively observant handheld operator as he goes about documenting the lives of CIA agent Valerie Plame and her former ambassador husband Joe Wilson, played to the standard beats by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn respectively, two actors who fit easily into the director-cinematographer’s naturalistic sandpit.

Plame and Wilson are real people whose names perhaps don’t mean much to Australian viewers, which could make Fair Game a hard sell locally when it goes on general release in two weeks time. But regardless of your geopolitical ignorance, the true story of the CIA agent (Plame) wrongfully unmasked by a panicky Bush administration in an effort to deflate the criticisms of her former ambassador husband (Wilson) does feel a little long in the tooth.

Not that it’s put to the screen with anything less than impeccable precision, particularly during the spy games of an involving first half. In 2002 Plame is a respected agent working for a intelligence agency that’s trying hard to calm the sabre rattling of its own government. Of particular interest to the Bush administration are reports of an underhanded uranium trade between Niger and Iraq.

Needing a trustworthy regional expert, the agency calls upon Plame’s husband, the crotchety, straight-talking Joe Wilson, to travel to Niger to investigate, and the former ambassador takes little time to declare the claims as being total bupkis. But after Wilson gets back to the US he finds his report being twisted by the government and matched with some dodgy intelligence concerning aluminium tubes to justify a case for war.

Fair Game sails into more troubling waters in its second half, when the spy thrills are dropped in favour of simplified morality play. A post-Iraq invasion Wilson-penned newspaper op-ed has landed the couple in hot water with the government – particularly with Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby (David Andrews) – and their reactions to the turmoil are very different, placing considerable strain on their marriage.

It’s a structural switch courtesy of screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth that annoys the viewer. What happened to all those people Plame promised to protect? Her fury at their fate doesn’t really grab you like the real thing. Instead you have to be satisfied with the couple’s fight to protect their own rights. Yeah, they stick it to the government in the end, but the film sells short its ancillary foreign characters, and all the inspired fighting talk from the Washington terraces ultimately holds little traction with a high-and-dry audience.

Still, when it’s onscreen, Fair Game is ridiculously watchable, courtesy of Liman, editor Chris Tellefsen, and John Powell, who delivers a stirring soundtrack. It’s slick stuff, and much better than the other 90 per cent of material that hits the multiplexes week in week out, but Fair Game could have perhaps used a touch more narrative conviction and a little less thematic pontificating.


I say: A worthy political thriller, but hardly an exceptional one. You’re likely to leave the cinema as frustrated with the filmmakers as you are angry with the Bush government.

See it for: The leads are indeed fine, even if their characters are a little too by-the-beat to allow us to truly care about them.