Review: Fair Game

Review: Fair Game

Rating: ***

Nonna's Rating: $$$

Rotten Tomatoes: 80%

Audience: 72%

The strength of this movie is the realistic portrayal of a marriage in meltdown (delivered through the exceptional talents of Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, and Sean Penn as her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.)

Wilson had written an op-ed piece in the NY Times, alleging that intelligence information had been manipulated by the Bush White House in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Remember? They had weapons of mass destruction: weapons which were never found. The story goes that Rove, Cheney, and Scooter Libby outed Plame in retaliation for the Times article. We may never know how it all happened and who was truly responsible, but Libby (the only person charged) was found guilty of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and perjury. He was, of course, later pardonned by George W. Bush.

The film focuses on the upheaval in Plame and Wilson's lives. Yes, she was in an occupation fraught with danger. Every time she traveled overseas, her life was at risk. She and her husband had accepted that risk. Knowing this, however, we still empathize with their horror and terror when Plame is exposed. We understand that she has been violated in this inside-out version of identity theft.

The movie does not end with a trumpeted triumphant legal victory. It ends with a whimper -- as it should. The incessantly drumming subtext of the film is that there were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no justification for the war on Iraq. Thousands of Americans died for a lie -- and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died and will continue to die. We sowed the wind and we have reaped the whirlwind.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price

$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it