REVIEW: Watts and Penn Shine in Provocative If Uneven Fair Game

If casting is half the battle, then Fair Game director Doug Liman was already three-quarters of the way home when he signed Naomi Watts to play former CIA agent Valerie Plame and Sean Penn her blustering diplomat husband. As Plame and Joe Wilson, Watts and Penn get to sink their chops into one of the most cinema-friendly true stories in recent history; if a guy in a bathrobe writing world-beating code could be conjured into a blissfully entertaining movie, what might be done with the story of a spy, who did spy stuff in war time, until her righteous husband blew a couple of inconvenient whistles and her own government ruined her life? Featuring George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice as themselves? Refresh that, Sorkin!

In fact it was the incorrigibly verbal Social Network writer whose spirit I kept hoping might turn up to bless Fair Game, or at least add some snap and crackle to what is more of a simmer-until-done inquiry into dirty Bush II-era politics and domestic conflict resolution than a Bourne-style action potboiler. Based on both Plame and Wilson's respective memoirs, the script, written by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, begins with a confident balance of character, background and story: In the opening sequence, dateline fall of 2001, Plame expertly flips a potential informant in Kuala Lumpur; in the next scene she suffers her husband's inability to keep a dinner party from turning into a moral re-education camp. "Well, Jeff..." Wilson begins, after a freaked-out friend (Tom McCarthy) admits that he couldn't see a demonstrably Muslim passenger on a plane without losing his marbles. Liman cuts to Plame mildly chastising her husband on the ride home; Wilson retorts (he's not big on simply responding) with a crinkle that she knew he was "like this" when they got married.

A few of those extra-cinematic winks help Fair Game hit the ground running: Physically Watts is of course a decent match for the even more aggressively glamorous Plame; in spirit, it would seem, they are even closer. In the field Plame was first and foremost an actress, a pretender whose belief in her pretending was often of mortal consequence. Even at home she is unknown, lying to her husband about where she's going and where she's been as a matter of protocol, and rifling through personas like a performer in a six-person Shakespeare troupe. Penn brings a tidy chunk of his concerned-citizen image to his portrayal of an irrepressible, egotistical former diplomat. Their marriage is defined by distance, the dance of raising small children, a smidge of professional jealousy, and the melancholy gift of interlocking temperaments: His insecurity manifests in public outbursts, hers in a tendency to disappear, whether it be to a destination on the other side of the world or somewhere inside herself.

Too often Liman tries to turn exposition (and it occasionally feels like the story is suspended for a data dump) into small-scale action, so that a scene in which Plame's unit debates whether aluminum tubes reportedly found in Iraq are consistent with those used to build nuclear weapons is marred by over-caffeinated, army-crawling camerawork (Liman also acted as DP). By contrast, a beautiful suite of scenes depicting Scooter Libby's (David Andrews) interrogation of various CIA agents on the same subject captures the diabolical calibration of pressure -- precise and insinuating -- required to hot-wire the war machine into ignition. He just keeps asking the question -- "What can you tell me about aluminum tubes?" -- until he gets the answer he wants.

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