A film never to be confused with the 1995 Cindy Crawford-Billy Baldwin actioner of the same name, director Doug Liman’s Fair Game is a riveting political thriller based on the real-life exposure of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), whose career was destroyed when her covert identity was published as part of a politically motivated press leak after her ex-diplomat husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), penned a critical op-ed outlining his conclusions about the alleged attempted sale of enriched uranium from Niger to Iraq during the drumbeat of run-up to war in that country.



There’s enough political intrigue and moving and shaking here to more or less satisfy fans of adult power-corridor drama like Michael Clayton, The International and Body of Lies. Whipsmart pacing, crackerjack dialogue and smart editing make it bristle with an entirely earned indignation; Fair Game is the sort of film Alan J. Pakula would have knocked out of the park just as resolutely as Liman were its circumstances set two decades or so ago. And the real (and important) themes under the microscope here — personal courage and steadfastness, bureaucratic cowardice and governmental betrayal — are more than just ably delineated, they’re given a searingly tangible injection of intimacy and immediacy, courtesy of all those involved in the production.

But screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, working from two books by the film’s subjects, also tackle the human consequences of Plame’s outing with great economy and aplomb. It is greatly to its credit that the film is brutally honest about the widening chasm in the pair’s marriage as a result of differing reactive approaches — Wilson wants to hit back, and hit back hard, while Plame is reticent to do so. The performances here, in Watts and Penn’s third pairing, are swollen with angst and interpersonal turmoil, and Liman’s handheld camera style matches the swirl of chaos, both domestic and professionally, that envelops the narrative.

In its end game, the movie dips just a bit into awkward, civics lesson speechifying, but it’s a lecture, regardless of personal politics, more Americans would be wise to heed — a powerful message about the bullhorn naturally accorded to power, and the anger and betrayal the public should feel when that benefit of the doubt is willfully abused, in perfidious fashion. (Summit, PG-13, 106 minutes)