Doug Liman's Fair Game, an adaptation of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's book of the same name (as well as her husband Joe Wilson's The Politics of Truth), was released this weekend in the Tampa Bay area, where it's now playing at the Veterans 24 in Hillsborough county and in Baywalk in St. Petersburg. Though it's the definitive biographical story from Wilson's perspective of what happened to them leading up to and following Plame's identity being leaked in a column by the late Robert Novak, it's not the first American film that's dealt with this story.
Rod Lurie's terrific 2008 film Nothing But the Truth (that basically went straight to video) was a fictional depiction of the Plame/Wilson saga. That film focused as much on the Robert Novak character, who in the movie actually is a female journalist who also ends up sort of playing former New York Times reporter Judith Miller (the journalist ends up going to jail because she won't reveal her source — in real life Miller spent 85 days in jail before revealing that Scooter Libby provided Plame's name to her). In Nothing But the Truth the Plame character is played by Vera Farmiga. Judith Miller's character was also depicted earlier this year in Paul Greengrass's Green Zone by the actress Amy Ryan, which had a storyline about a major reporter realizing she is being used as a propaganda machine to sell the Iraq war.
But back to Fair Game, which features two of our finest actors, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, at the top of their game playing the power couple. It's a searing drama that is sympathetic to the couple and what happens to them personally after the Bush administration went after Wilson, the former ambassador who set off the chain of events after his infamous New York Times op-ed where he outed President Bush for those famous 16 words in his 2003 State of The Union address :
