Fair Game: All the Vice President’s Henchmen

Sean Penn and Naomi Watts in "Fair Game" (Photo: Ken Regan)

Director/producer Doug Liman’s Fair Game is one of Hollywood’s best fact based political thrillers since 1976’s Robert Redford-produced All the President’s Men. This is an excellent dramatization of the high level leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s (Naomi Watts) identity to the press after her husband, ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), dared to publicly debunk His Royal Anus George W. Bush’s lies about Iraq’s purported nuclear weapons program in his 2003 State of the Union rant.

The feature uses news footage of actual historical personages and events interwoven with actors portraying newsmakers, including the heavies: David Andrews as Vice Pres. Dick Cheney’s henchman Scooter Libby and, in lesser roles (onscreen, if not off), Geoffrey Cantor as Bush Press Secretary Ari “Watch-what-you-say” Fleischer, Michael Goodwin as the Cheney legal counsel/chief of staff/torture aficionado David “Brain Addled” Addington and Adam LeFevre as Bush propagandist Karl “The Architect” Rove. The film’s title is taken from something Rove told MSNBC hardballer Chris Matthews: That Wilson’s wife is “fair game” to hunt.

Rove’s point, of course, was to silence dissenters, whistleblowers, etc., who opposed Bush’s bogus war on Iraq, one of the biggest blunders and war crimes in human history. Uber-war criminal Bush is making the rounds now trying to drum up sales for his memoir, claiming he was “sickened” by never finding the mythical WMDs that were used as the rationale for an illegal, immoral, extremely expensive war and waste of money and human lives. Bush may feel “sick,” but he’ll never feel as badly as those whose loved ones perished in this unnecessary war of aggression. Fair Game is based on two separate books by Plame and Wilson, and it could have been an instructional documentary or docudrama, if preachy and even, perhaps, dreary.

But it was one of the biggest cinematic strokes of inspiration in film history since the Nazis chose Leni Riefenstahl to lens Triumph of the Will to tap Liman to helm Fair Game. Riefenstahl was primarily known as an actress in German mountain climbing films and for directing 1932’s Alpine epic The Blue Light, and not as a documentarian, when Adolph Hitler selected her to shoot the Nuremburg rallies. Der Fuhrer, of course, had pretensions to being an artist, and Riefenstahl brought her pictorial sensibility to bear on what could have been an unbearably boring agitprop film. Instead, with her striking visual sense and imagery, Riefenstahl rendered (from a graphic point of view) a bearably boring piece of propaganda. (Although I think Hitler’s reputation as an orator is vastly overrated: I didn’t understand a fucking word he said.)

This is not to compare Liman to Leni (Fleischer and Rove would be better comparisons, to both Riefenstahl and Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels). However, picking the director of the action-packed The Bourne Identity and Mr. And Mrs. Smith to shoot what is, in essence, an espionage thriller was a great idea.

Naomi Watts (Photo: Ken Regan)

What is a smart idea that makes Fair Game a three dimensional family drama about flesh and blood people rather than a mere history lesson is that the script by brothers John-Henry Butterworth and Jez Butterworth depicts the marital strains and tensions caused by the ordeal Plame and Wilson were subjected to, and how this affected their young children. (In addition to directing action flicks Liman also directed the 1996 character-driven indie Swingers.) Plame, the CIA spy, is by nature secretive and behind the scenes. Wilson, the former ambassador, may not be very diplomatic but he astutely observes that only by coming out swinging publicly in the media could they hope to defend their honor and expose the Bush flacks who sullied their reputations. The differences in approach threatens to destroy what is, after all, a marriage.

For the record, I was one of the early journalists who wrote fairly about Wilson, whom I met, and Penn, as usual, does a bravura job in meticulously capturing his subject’s mannerisms, et al, and in getting under his skin. However, as the title character, it is really Naomi Watts who lights up the screen in the lead role, and I predict an Oscar nom for this awesome Aussie actress who is also outstanding in the new Woody Allen film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. You’ve come a long way since King Kong, baby.

Film adaptations of books, be they novels or nonfiction, as well as of real life events, are necessarily exercises in selectivity. And so it is with Fair Game: In are Wilson’s colorful quote about “frog marching Karl Rove” and his efforts to be profiled with Plame in Vanity Fair; out are the actual Vanity Fair spread which caused a minor Beltway sensation, and the roles Rove and Bush may or may not have played in the scandal. Also left out: The whole execrable Judy Miller/N.Y. Times matter (which inspired Rod Lurie’s underrated 2008 Nothing But the Truth starring Kate Beckinsale) and Bush’s CIA Director George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Plame’s boss. Also omitted is “hardboiled” prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who the bourgeois press sold to us as a virtual Elliot Ness, proved to be a total flop who never indicted Rove, Cheney, and the other war criminals involved in outing Plame in order to save their own necks, and he recently flopped again with the Rod Blagojevich case. Nevertheless, I realize you can’t include everything (that would be a mini-series!), and this is a compelling story about the attempts to punish truth tellers.

Although I want to point out that l’affaire Plame is curious in that what passes for the U.S. left lionized not only a U.S. ambassador, but a CIA agent, Valerie the Valkyrie, for speaking truth to power. In fact, while the Wilsons did indeed undeniably display fortitude and courage in the face of great adversity, the Left should put this scandal in its proper perspective, as a faction fight in the ruling circles of power. For both Plame and Wilson had been champions of the establishment though their government careers – albeit, as we saw, not humble obedient servants thereof.

Ed Rampell

The Plame scandal has been compared to France’s Dreyfus Affair, wherein a Jewish army captain was falsely accused of treason in the 1890s. Now, as I had told Joe Wilson, I’ll tell you something you probably never knew: The chief investigator in Dreyfus’ secret court martial was named Du Pati Du Plame. Wilson had told me Plame was a rare last name (although thanks to Scooter Libby, Rove, Richard Armitage, Watts, etc., now a quite famous one), so I find this to be a fantastic coincidence. Or fate.

Hunt down Fair Game at a theatre new you – and read my original L.A. CityBeat interview with Joe Wilson, published back in 2004, which accompanies this review.

Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian, critic, author, freelance writer and wag who wrote the Oct. 26, 2001 Tucson Weekly cover story“Tinseltown’s Tombstone, A Look at the Real and Reel Wyatt Earp.”