Doug Liman is an undeniably talented director, though his choice of films in which to use this talent is not always great. Well, Yahoo has the trailer for his newest choice, Fair Game. No it’s not a remake of the Billy Baldwin/Cindy Crawford masterpiece. It’s the ripped-from-the-headlines and thrillerized telling of the Valeria Plame story.
For American troglodytes who’ve only surfaced from their cave dwelling recently, or foreign readers for whom said story probably wasn’t of much interest, Valerie Plame was a CIA agent whose career was buttfucked in July 2003 when Washington Post asshole/journalist Robert Novak outted her as an agent. Scandal erupted when it became clear that this information was leaked to Novak by members of the Bush administration, presumably as retaliation for a publication made by Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, in which Wilson had concluded that the administration had exaggerate the Iraqi threat to justify the war.
Plame wrote a book about the events, Fair Game, which served as the basis for the film. Wilson and Plame also served as consultants on the film and are played by Noami Watts and Sean Penn – not that Hollywoodized casting either, both Plame and Wilson are good lookin’ folks. The film co-stars Sam Shepard, the great Bruce McGill, and Brooke “It puts the lotion on its skin” Smith.
The trailer looks fine, but I find it hard to get excited about true stories that occurred so recently. Especially for a true story of this scale (Watergate this ain’t). And when a true-life event is so fresh in our memories, there’s always a high risk that the movie will feel like a TV-movie (hopefully an HBO movie, if you’re lucky). At least Liman is trying something new, I guess.