Fair Game (USA/UAE; Doug Liman, 2010)

    I haven't been watching enough films lately and I'm starting to feel a few threads of sanity starting to get loose. Actually, I have seen a few movies in the past few days but it's been mostly repeats or else titles that don't warrant much to be written about. Of these, however, Fair Game was probably the best one. The film chronicles the real-life tribulations of exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), whose editorial piece refuting the Bush administration's contention that Niger was dealing with Iraq sparked the initial exposure of Plame's top-secret identity. Mainly, it deals with Wilson's adamant media-frenzied quest to expose the truth versus Plame's irrevocable silence on the matter, an oppositon that ultimately threatens the integrity of their marriage. Seemlessly blending stock news footage with convincing reenactments of known events, Fair Game is a decent political thriller, even if it doesn't tell anything new. The US lied about Iraq's nuclear condition; much the same message as the same year's Green Zone (Paul Greengrass), marketed more as an action film. In Game, the internal exposure angle aptly reflects the country's internal division at the time and how this, as much as anything else, might be responsible for the unfiltered information that was eventually taken for fact and fed to the public. Furthermore, it is interesting to have Doug Liman ( The Bourne Identity; Mr. and Mrs. Smith) direct a film that is not action-oriented, bringing me back to consider his earlier films (Swingers; Go), realizing how professional and attuned his approach has become, giving a possibly bland script (although some dialogue was well formulated) some engaging rythm (its also trivially interesting to note that Greengrass directed the sequels to Liman's Identity, evidently once again sharing the same thematic interests). Fortunately, the beat is kept in line with perfectly acceptable performances by the headlining stars in a picture that at least brings satisfaction in knowing that events get a bit more uplifting than the last time Penn and Watts played husband and wife (21 Grams, 2003).