Fairly believable.By John DeSando, "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"It was a crime against all of you." Joe Wilson (Sean Penn)
Fair Game is how I like my history served: "fair" to the truth of the events and "game" in dramatizing the game being played. In the first decade of this century Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) was a covert CIA operative, brokering deals around the world to help the peace process wherever the US could go. Her husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), a former African ambassador, wrote a New York Times op-ed piece debunking the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The game afoot was the Bush White House's outing Plame as an agent allegedly to retaliate against Wilson. The docudrama holds to the truth of the circumstances while it adds too much domestic component of a couple with growing children and an enormous pressure on their different responses to the crisis.
The drama of a man speaking out against the lies of the most powerful men in history and a wife torn among loyalty to the secrecy of her mission, her sense of honesty, and her honest husband are deftly told without the excessive emoting some Hollywood treatments of political history employ.
Director Doug Liman has crafted a believable story instantly verifiable by those of us who have lived through the futile search for wmd's and Scooter Libby's (David Andrews) indictment for leaking Plame's identity. The story, however, loses dramatic clarity with its emphasis on the family fighting and care of kids when more could be dramatized about the terrible lies that resulted in thousands of deaths, a shattered economy, and loss of global trust for America.
Read W's recent justification for his presidency so you can have a fair and balanced view of events that have already shaped a century. Leave it to movies to get the history right.
John DeSando co-hosts It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee for WCBE 90.5. The shows can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com