Fair Game gets political

Fair Game doesn’t require much more than the plain facts to be an effective political drama. The real-life story played out a few years ago, after Bush administration officials outed undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for an op-ed written by her husband denouncing the government’s bogus Iraq WMD evidence. Plamegate and its aftermath are a matter of public record, but this dramatic recreation still gets the blood boiling with its depiction of how the Bushies molded scraps of shoddy and ambiguous intelligence into a justification for war. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are solid as Plame and her husband, and the movie’s portrayal of their marital struggles in the wake of the scandal add heart to what could have been an overly righteous political screed.