Fair Game

There’s a style of filmmaking that suits Fair Game. It’s the type of serious procedural utilized by films like All The President’s Men, where true events are slightly fictionalized to allow for a kind of historical retelling of current fact.

Fair Game follows the outing of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) as a CIA agent, as it turns out by the then ruling government administration. Sean Penn plays her husband Joe Wilson while other cast members seem as if they’re familiar because we’ve seen them in other movies or the same characters in the news. As directed by Doug Liman, the art of being a spy doesn’t involve action heroics (like in Liman’s Bourne films or Mr. and Mrs. Smith) so much as subterfuge, middle class angst and an idealistic patriotism signified by boring paperwork rather than jingosim.

Comparisons to Alan J. Pakula (helmer of All The President’s Men) are apt; after all it was Pakula who defined the conspiracy film with President’s Men and Parallax View. Liman has tapped into the spine of what makes confusion and paranoia a part of everyday life. Even as Plame becomes ostracized by her fellow agents, she and her husband continue to hold their heads high – the perfect target for a country intent on ruling its denizens through fear.

– Michael Bergeron

by Editor

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