Fair Game

Packed into approximately three minutes of credit-crawling footage at the end of drab political drama Fair Game, composer John Powell’s closing music features everything that is missing from the preceding movie. It is energetic, paranoid, exciting, intriguing, and surprisingly thrilling. It’s an impressive piece of brief musical punch that may fit the true story, but certainly doesn’t fit the movie. Directed by Doug Liman with a firm aim that targets middling mediocrity at every turn, Fair Game is perhaps most commendable for simply being better than the junky 1995 Cindy Crawford-starring action flick with which it shares a title. That may be the definition of faint praise, but it’s about all Liman’s movie deserves.

What is most frustrating about this exploration of specific events leading up to the 2003 launching of the Iraq war is how Liman squanders so many juicy opportunities to wring tension and drama from the narrative. The story of how the Bush administration resorted to blowing the cover of heavily embedded CIA agent Valerie Plame (a striking Naomi Watts) in response to the revelation released by Plame’s ex-ambassador husband Joe Wilson (a fiery Sean Penn) that Saddam did not appear to be in possession of WMDs is a damning portrait of government power gone awry.

It also hinges on the birth of one of the most explosive events in recent memory. The idea that the upper echelons of government could tell a gigantic lie in order to start a war is perhaps less shocking nowadays, but it remains a scary thought that is ripe with political paranoia. And since the plot of Fair Game is closely concerned with two individuals who saw their lives turned upside down when all they wanted to do was protect their country in the best and most honest way possible, there is significant room for meaty drama.

But Liman’s movie is so weak and flavourless that it fails to make an impact in either of the genre-spanning areas it seeks to examine. Fair Game is too soggy to be a crackling political thriller and too robotic to be a touching domestic drama. The unfolding mess with the impending war is communicated almost entirely through news footage that lazily allows Liman to pinpoint the actual George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove as the true villains of this movie. Obviously, these three men are heavily tied to the story, but sandwiching some television clips between a collection of staged scenes is a pretty dull way to utilize the core antagonism of the narrative.

With the political thriller aspects lacking thrills and imagination, it’s up to the romantic side of the story to save the movie. Putting Watts and Penn in the same room together and handing them such potentially meaningful conflict as a strained marriage to work with seems like a rather brilliant bit of casting, considering the immense talent that has been often exhibited by these two. But Watts and Penn prove to have a total dearth of chemistry between them, which renders their shared love story ineffective and unbelievable. As the problems in their professional lives intensify, their relationship suffers greatly, but the immensity of the situation is lost amidst a smattering of cold kisses and senseless stares.

Using Watts and Penn with such underwhelming results is almost preposterous in how flippantly this context wastes their talent. The two of them seem like a great fit for this material, but they never connect with their characters or each other. They’re trapped by Liman’s wooden direction, but they still need to shoulder some of the blame for tackling their roles in such safe and predictable ways. Their performances are not terrible by any means and they each have a decent moment or two where they manage to shine, but there’s nothing particularly memorable about either character and their scenes together are nearly emotionless.

Unable to register a pulse in either the political or romantic aspects of the plot, Fair Game dejectedly flatlines and then ignores the importance of dramatic resurrection. Once the movie begins to fail early on, there’s no saving it from the structural sag that leaves the overall arc looking decidedly limp. The movie quickly begins to drag its feet and the energy required to right the pacing troubles is never tapped. Scenes are crudely glued together and the concept of narrative cohesion is dumbly discarded. There is no flow, no up and down to the story and everything begins to feel dramatically monochromatic.

Since Liman’s direction is relatively lacking across the board, it’s probably safe to say that he stretches himself too thin by adopting cinematographer duties as well. The movie’s icy look mirrors the coldness with which the onscreen media eventually drags Valerie’s name through the mud, but Liman’s approach to the visuals is either incredibly simplistic (not necessarily a bad thing) or annoyingly unsubtle. At one point, the camera pseudo-dramatically circles Joe as he stands outside in what is supposed to be some ponderous thought. When the camera finally settles down and stops spinning, Joe is still in the foreground, but now the Capitol building looms ominously in the background. In such a flat and uninvolving movie, this framed juxtaposition of man and institution just feels obvious and easy.

There isn’t much to commend in Fair Game and so identifying all that is absent from the movie is integral to uncovering why the movie fails as it does. The list of missing ingredients is too vast and the movie cannot support the weight of the subject matter under such weak and lifeless direction. The two leads don’t help matters and their lack of chemistry is hugely destructive to the story. And so, thinking of all that this movie is not, I return to John Powell’s closing music, which fully encapsulates the potential of a story that is both political and personal. It’s just a small portion of his overall score and it’s certainly not groundbreaking or anything along those lines, but it is impressively energetic and emotionally exciting. His music hints at a better movie, which makes it all the more frustrating that Liman’s finished product is so stifled and stiff. This Fair Game may be better than the Cindy Crawford vehicle with the same name, but it’s still not very good, which, given the subject matter, is not nearly fair enough.