Review of Fair Game (2010) by Shiira — 03 Dec 2010

The American public is fair game for ridicule when it comes to the subject of how a good majority of us reacted towards the events leading up to our country's invasion of Iraq. Either we were asleep or misinformed, and Joe Wilson(Sean Penn), the husband of outed spy Valerie Plame who wrote an op-ed piece entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa" shortly after the "shock and awe" of 2003, is employed by the filmmaker to make us feel stupid about our collective apathy and naivety.

Watching the Penn-like Joe in "Fair Game"(after all, the Hollywood actor is also a committed political activist) is akin to being stuck in the company of the smartest man in the room. Make no mistake about it, Joe Wilson has an air of smugness about him, an honest-to-goodness blowhard, but when you consider the lives lost among our military personnel and the collateral damage they caused on the other side of the Atlantic, we probably do deserve a little cigar smoke blown in our faces, and be taken to task.

When Joe calls his wife's friend's husband a "racist p*ssy", it's an indictment on many Americans who would have agreed with that man's expressed leeriness toward the prospects of being on a plane with an Arab, only to years after 9/11.

For all intents and purposes, Joe just called us a bunch of racist p*ssies, especially if you share such a xenophobic viewpoint to this very day. At that pub, at the outset of "Fair Game", there's a brief shot of Joe glancing up at the television just before he returns to the small party of couples gathered at his table.

It's a tight shot: just him, the bartender, and a seated customer nursing his beer at the bar, so it would be pure speculation to say that nobody else in that drinking institution shares his interest in current events.

As it turns out, he probably was the only one. Later in the film, Joe stares up at the television again, but this time, the filmmaker goes wide, and reveals in that airport departure area, a microcosm of people's indifference toward all things political, as the true patriot finds himself surrounded by sleepers while our former president delivers "the sixteen words that led us to war" during his State of the Union address.

Joe alone, seemingly, knew about the abuses of power carried out by the Bush administration, and granted, it took courage to write that piece on his visit to Niger(which contradicted Bush on the subject of those aluminum tubes which were purported to hold Sadaam's uranium), but he's no ordinary Joe, an arch-liberal who knew that Sadaam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States(another gathering, another wife's friend's husband gets blasted for being an ignoramus), so to some extent, Valerie Plame's husband must have known about the media firestorm he was concocting by defying the leader of the free world.

Writing the letter to the New York Times was his opportunity to step out from under his wife's considerable shadow. "Fair Game" isn't afraid to show the real Joe Wilson, warts and all. Before Wilson becomes an envoy to Niger, he goes through an interview process conducted by some Pentagon higher-ups, and before they're seated, the somewhat emasculated man, perhaps feeling like a subordinate of his wildly intimidating wife, introduces himself as "Joe Wilson" with a slight manic edge to his voice and over-vigorous handshaking style that denotes an insecurity about being Valerie Plame's husband.

Maybe, perhaps, a little hostility too, as evidenced by his use of the word "p*ssy", a derogatory term that implies the fairer gender as being the weaker sex, which certainly is not the case with this particular couple.

When Valerie loses her job at the CIA, and becomes a target for spinning right-wing pundits on a daily basis, Joe finally gets to be her protector, the proverbial man of the house, as his one-man crusade against the political machinations of Scooter Libby and the other White House gorillas could be interpreted as an ego trip, albeit one SUffused with genuine love for his wife.

But it counterbalances the scene where Joe is the chick, the woman who gets left behind, when he complains about Valerie's frequent disappearing acts, just before this real life Salt leaves home in the wee morning hours.

"I never know where you are," says Joe. That's a chick's line.