Fair Game (2010)

I was not a fan of the former President. He just reeked of dishonesty and stupidity - two traits that have been well documented during the time he was in office and since he retired. His bullshit memoir was pure fiction and I wish we lived in a world were a powerful war criminal like himself could be put in the jail he so rightly belongs in. Him and his cackling Igor - Dick Chaney.

In the lead up to the current Iraq war which is still going on, the Bush administration looked for anything they could that would justify the invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Instead of relying on proven, reliable intelligence (that would have told the US that Saddam had shut down his weapons of mass destruction programs after the first Gulf War) they chose to cherry pick what they could to build a case (however week) that would allow them to drop the bombs and take control of the oil that Iraq had.

We all know how all that played out.


One of the strongest pieces of intelligence the administration had was information that yellow cake uranium from Niger and aluminum tubing used in centrifuges was going into Iraq. These were components that could be used to build a nuclear program.

Bush himself, in one of his State of the Union Address, claimed this to be the truth. It wasn't and Ambassador Joe Wilson knew it to be a lie because he was the very man that went to Niger to gather intel on the yellow cake uranium at the request of his wife Valerie Plame, a CIA agent.


Instead of staying quiet about the lie and the way he was used, Wilson decided to come forward and out the President as a liar. The result of those actions was that the White House conspired to punish him by releasing the name of his wife to the press and public. Her name was Valerie Plame and for many years she was a loyal CIA operative who worked diligently to try to discover what kinds of weapons programs Saddam actually had.

At first both Wilson and Plame were vilified by eventually it was discovered that the Vice-Presidents Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, was complicit in the illegal release of Plame's identity. He is still in jail for that crime, a crime that touches both Chaney and Bush.


The movie is a pretty accurate re-telling of events but focuses mostly on the marriage of Wilson (played by Sean Penn) and Plame (Naomi Watts ). It's interesting but you don't really learn anything new about the story than you didn't already know before from press coverage which I followed pretty closely. It doesn't have the feel of a cover-up being discovered. It just is flat.

There are only a couple of scenes that show how her life was affected once she was 'exposed' and her effectiveness as a C.I.A. agent was destroyed. I would have liked to see more such scenes so we could really get a handle on how her life was ruined by the underhanded political tricks of the Bush administration.


If the movie's purpose was to vilify the Bush administration and those operatives in the administration who wanted to have war at any cost it didn't go enough for the throat to satisfy me. I was angered to see who easily lives could be destroyed by people who only sought to tell the truth but that is an old story.

Trusting a government to do the right thing in the honest way would have been the real surprising thing to have happened.

This was just business as usual.

5/10