Unfairness Doctrine

Fair Game

Directed by Doug Liman

Runtime: 106 min.

In Fair Game, Doug Liman’s vistas of domestic Iraq just before the 2003 U.S. invasion are such a shoddy, quasi documentary artifice they could only impress audiences who have never seen films from the Middle East, and so Liman’s Hollywood-stylized realism may momentarily dominate their cultural imagination. That’s how propaganda works—rhetoric substitutes for facts or reason. Liman’s dramatization of the U.S. involvement with Iraq’s instability leading to the Valerie Plame case (based on separate memoirs by Plame and her husband) takes her side with a slanted narrative and shaky-cam, Winterbottomfed images drained of color. There’s even de-saturated video of President Bush at the UN explaining his Weapons of Mass Destruction scenario for invading Iraq—de-saturated to deny the emotional suasion of the moment when he movingly admitted, “We dread the days of mourning that always come.”

Yes, the vilified former president evidenced more sense of occasion than the makers of Fair Game. Liman and comrades don’t believe in the audience’s ability to accurately remember the Iraq War events that included Plame’s exposure as a covert CIA agent along with her husband Joe Wilson, both supposedly smeared as part of the Bush administration’s war campaign. Liman apparently doesn’t believe in the FCC’s obsolete Fairness Doctrine; he turns political history into the same actionmovie nonsense as his The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. His campaign of oversimplification rehashes the old No- Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction complaint.

Plame (played by Naomi Watts) is a brilliant, attractive operative and Wilson (Sean Penn), a principled intellectual. They fight back angry-Liberal-style when they feel betrayed by government bureaucracy and the pressure threatens their marriage. Their faith in the system is disturbed even though they have no skepticism about the media. They’re just always right: Plame wants to safeguard her Iraqi researcher-informants (“These scientists are the WMDs! If we can’t protect them they’ll run to the first country that does!”), and Wilson claims to defend the Constitution.

This insufferable mixture of partisan principle and exploitation-movie gimcrack is part of the contemporary political and cultural carelessness now rampant in movies, TV, the press and the Internet. Liman epitomizes the new, insensitive media hackery. Unlike the old sociallyconscious protest films (once called “problem pictures”), Fair Game typifies the new genre in which characters act out the cynicism of our disenchanted media elite rather than pursue hokey ol’ social responsibility. The star power and acting skill that Watts and Penn bring to this MSNBC-style narrative (she’s perfectly cast for feminine anguish; he for liberal egotism) is intended to glamorize a privileged partisan perspective.

Patriotism gets replaced by Left Liberals’ self-justifying determination to dissent like 1960s radicals. I call such movies “Clooneys”—derived from George Clooney’s politically naive, arrogantly liberal screeds Goodnight and Good Luck, Syriana, Michael Clayton and The American—that attempt moral persuasion through unscrupulous dramatic manipulation. A pouty anti-Americanism—born of the selfloathing liberals felt ever since their disenfranchisement by Bush’s 2000 election—fuels this degradation of the action and political flick. Clooneys are never above employing fear, tension, torture, killing, treason and sedition due to misguided nostalgia for ’70s-style Hollywood radical chic—a substitution for our confused and disconcerted beliefs, post-9/11.

This self-righteousness ruins Fair Game as drama. The title comes from Plame’s claim that Karl Rove, Bush’s chief of staff, targeted her as “fair game” in retaliation after Wilson contradicted Bush’s WMDs strategy in a New York Times op-ed. This repeats the familiar Left complaint that the American government is hostile to its citizens, especially those who oppose the administration’s policies. But turning

Plame’s political paranoia into romantic suspense, rather than an argument of principles, is basically unserious.

Liman’s one-sidedness ignores how his protagonists’ defiance resembles treason and never explores the risks involved with the exercise of free speech— especially when privileged, empowered people like Plame and Wilson misuse the responsibility. The script by Brits Jez and John Henry Butterworth glides past the inconvenient truth and complexity of the Plame case and the Wilson marriage. It sentimentalizes the tension between their commitments—hers military, his academic, both supposedly patriotic. Having switched allegiances, they share the arrogant assumption that their belief in America is nobler than anyone else’s: “You have to know why you’re lying… and never forget the truth,” Plame explains to a distraught Iraqi woman.

Fair Game stumbles into the quagmire of “truth” when it avoids the journalistic and spousal breach that actually led to Plame’s expose. The difficult complexities of facts and personal trust (Wilson jeopardizes his wife) get in the way, so Liman stokes anti-Bush fever through caricature performances (the actors playing Rove and Scooter Libby are framed as clowns) and shifting blame for Plame’s travails from the media to the White House. (It was columnist Robert Novak who breached confidentiality by publishing Plame’s identity.)

Things get off-the-rails funny when Plame and Wilson are hounded by the very media they think are their allies in the truth industry. It’s hilariously corny when Sam Shepherd appears as Plame’s clichéd dad and proclaims, “What they did to you was plain wrong.” The word “they” mysteriously changes from the predatory media to the all-purpose vague, ominous Bush administration. It’s imprecise, blogosphere talk, leading to Plame’s cry: “By the time they’re finished with us we won’t know what the truth is.” True enough—whoever “they” is—and it applies to this movie, too.