Fair Game: Let's Enjoy the Valerie Plame CIA Mess All Over Again
Here's a trailer for Doug Liman's Fair Game, a political thriller about the CIA leak disaster that burned undercover operative Valerie Plame, possibly because her husband, Joe "Not the 'You Lie' Guy" Wilson was publicly critical of the Iraq war.
That's Naomi Watts as Plame and Sean Penn as Wilson, which is pretty spot-on casting. They sort of look like their characters, and they are good at acting and will probably be good in this. And this is an exciting, frustrating story to tell. Did the Bush Administration leak Plame's identity to Robert Novak (and Judith Miller, an angle of the story that was fictionalized in 2008's Nothing But the Truth, with Vera Farmiga as the Plame character) after Wilson publicly claimed that the WMD hysteria was a deliberate, trumped up distraction? Yes, yeah, mmhmm, they probably did. But of course even the fall guy, former Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, got away scot-free, after Bush commuted his 30 month jail sentence. (Which wasn't really even directly related to the Plame case.) So unfortunately we mostly know how this story ends, and it's not satisfying, but watching the dramatics unfold with the help of capable actors and a genre-reaching director (Liman has been more of an action guy of late) should be interesting nonetheless. Ready to revisit the Bush years? Well, here we go.