Cannes Film Festival 2010: Doug Liman's Fair Game

Empire's Sam Toy has beaten me to posting on Fair Game, but I have time now to write a bit about what I thought. I liked it a lot, although I don't know yet how much that has to do with cabin fever, a lot of less than extraordinary films and a dearth of anything even remotely Hollywood. I also wasn't expecting this to be very pacy; after all, how far can you get with a story that entire revolves around a married couple and a newspaper article? Jez Butterworth's script handles that very well, though, and so the film ends up being more about a personal dilemma than a national one.

In that respect, Fair Game worked for me much better than Green Zone, which, if you remember, also told us quite a lot of things we already knew and ended with a man writing a stern email. There's not so much action in Doug Liman's film but the beauty of its subject matter means that a lot can be alluded to – and is. It begins in Kuala Lumpur, where a woman (Naomi Watts) is posing as a biochemist to get a meeting with a major businessman. After an exciting, Bond-style exchange with his nephew in which she reveals her true identity as an American spook (“Right now you have no idea what we can and and can't do,” she warns ominously), we cut to a Washington wine bar in the aftermath of 9/11.

It transpires that this woman is Valerie Plame, a key counter-proliferation agent with the CIA whose secret double life is unknown to everyone except her diplomat husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). This part of the film deals with Plame's involvement in what's now known as the yellowcake affair, in which the US government used some highly sketchy information to accuse Iraq of running a nuclear weapons programme, a charge intended to take the country to war. As a reminder of what actually happened, this was, to me, more effective that Green Zone's soldier's-eye-view take on the same, and there's some good political drama here.

Recommended by his wife, Wilson is sent by the CIA to investigate accusations that Iraq has been buying enriched uranium from Niger, and discovers there is no way this happened. Bush's government ignores his findings, though, and when Wilson hears the President quoting his own research document, leaving out the rather important bit about it not being true, he writes an angry op-ed for the New York Times. This is where the film shifts gear somewhat, and the tonal shift seems to be divisive: roughly an hour in, Plame is outed as a spy by the US government in retaliation to Wilson's article. Plame's career is now effectively over, and the taut drama of the first half slows to become a rather preachy but still involving relationship drama.

Of course, it all boils down to that newspaper article – should Wilson have written it, why did he write it, and what did he achieve – but Butterworth's script is smart enough to address issues of love and personal responsibility while tackling those questions. Watts takes something of a back seat in this section as she and Wilson become the focus of a right-wing smear campaign that her husband faces head-on while she stoically keeps her powder dry.

There's no Mr Deeds Goes To Washington moment, sadly, because a) this Mr Deeds was already there and b) they fucked him good and proper, but Wilson does emerge as a just and doggedly respectable character. The ending is upbeat, if slightly vague about what Plame's journey has actually been, but the important part of Liman's film is that it is not coy about the strength of the US propaganda machine and the moral toxicity of the second Bush administration. If I was an average-Joe American and had seen this and Inside Job too, I'd be feeling pretty mad about what's been happening under my nose lately.