Though Paul Greengrass took over for the sequels, Doug Liman directed The Bourne Identity, and is thus responsible for the current state of the espionage thriller. This is a companion-piece to Greengrass’ Green Zone, applying the style of Robert Ludlum conspiracy nonsense to the all-too-true hash of the Iraq War where, in these films at least, the reasoned, pragmatic, surprisingly sensible advice of the CIA was junked by rabid administration hawks in a scramble to find an excuse to blast Saddam Hussein.
Fair Game — blandly using a title from half a dozen other movies — is about the odd affair of The Ambassador, his wife The Spy and The White House Fixer. Given that the spat was mostly expressed in newspaper op-ed pieces and registered as a footnote to the greater farce of the search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Liman and screenwriter Jez Butterworth have to explain abstruse circumstances and ground them in human drama. Valerie (Naomi Watts) is seen in the field, making and manipulating contacts, then as a working suburban wife and mother with a distinguished but at-a-loose-end husband (Sean Penn). When her real job is publicly revealed, it causes chaos in her social and married life… but there are dark hints of a body-count around the world as her cases are dropped or mishandled (a list of Iraqi nuclear scientists she hopes to recruit is passed on to Mossad, who assassinate them instead).
It’s a showcase for star actors. Watts does well as essentially a realistic version of Evelyn Salt, coolly handling shady deals but also hosting suburban dinner parties properly. Penn (a vocal opponent of the war) gives Wilson a slight blowhard air which makes him interestingly unsympathetic, even when he’s in the right. If the ‘villains’ — David Andrews’ pursed-lips Scooter Libby — come across as cartoons, then they did in news footage too. The problem is, when global crisis puts stress on the couple’s marriage, it’s hard to care about their arguments while people get killed (or forgotten) offscreen.