Fair Game (2010)

“Fair Game” is a movie with two focuses. The one we know is the story of government power gone awry--and inadequately punished. The second is the counterpoint that makes this film personal--it is the portrait of a modern marriage under stress.
The central couple, professionally ambitious and proud of their accomplishments, live in material comfort and close to power, juggling the demands of work and domesticity in the usual ways. The husband, retired from one career, is trying to start a new business, while his wife, younger and on a faster track, flies around the world, taking meetings in global hot spots like Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, Amman and and so on. He has to deal with child care while she grapples with the pressures of office life. They don’t always communicate well, which means that when real trouble comes along, their relationship is compromised. The added wrinkle that they are Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson, whose story is a terrifying sidebar in the history of the George W. Bush years and an emblem of what American politics looked like back then. We need to keep fighting about the recent past because its legacy is still with us, and to distract us from the equally quarrelsome present. I am again reminded of the quote from The Tempest, "Hell is empty. All the Devils are here."
The film’s canniest, quietest insight is that for people in jobs like Ms. Plame's, careerism and dedication to a cause can be mutually reinforcing. The problem arises when her sense of what the job requires — a dispassionate, empirical analysis of the available intelligence — runs up against the political agenda. When she and her colleagues find extensive evidence that Iraq is not actively developing weapons of mass destruction, their conclusions are overridden by men from the office of the vice president. The bureaucrats charged with interpreting reality are trumped by the politicians whose avowed mission is to create reality--that sums up the Cheney Vice Presidency.
Valerie (played competently by Naomi Watts)is a disciplined functionary, tries to swallow her frustration and do as she is told. Joe, played with splendid, swaggering and affectionate pomposity by Sean Penn, is more of a wild card. Dispatched to Niger to check out allegations that Hussein had purchased large quantities of uranium, he finds nothing. When Mr. Bush, in his State of the Union address, contends that Iraq had indeed gone shopping for nuclear material in Africa, Joe tries to set the record straight and then publishes an Op-Ed article in The New York Times to make his case.
How does the Bush White House get even--because that is the mentality--Valerie’s cover is blown, and Joe wages a noisy campaign to expose the culprits and to defend both of their reputations against an onslaught of spin, innuendo and attempted character assassination.
What makes the film work is the precise counterpoint of public and domestic dramas. Mr. Penn and Ms. Watts are a convincingly imperfect couple. He is her temperamental foil, argumentative while she is circumspect. Joe loves to be right and to tell other people that they are wrong, and his zeal comes into conflict with both Valerie’s ingrained habit of secrecy and her natural reserve.
This part of the story — the portrait of the modern marriage — is graceful and subtle. Things worked out between Joe and Valerie, and for their real-life models, who are now the subjects of a terrifically entertaining movie. But that does not mean that justice was done, or that truth prevailed. The happy ending of the film fails to delve sufficiently into the wrong doings of a White House that didn't tolerate any dissension, but then, this is a movie, not a documentary.