Real-world intrigue is fertile ground for political thriller writers ? but dramatising recent history is a dangerous game, warns John Patterson
Is it just me, or does watching the recent past on film always feel really weird?
I circled around Fair Game for a while before watching it, so reluctant was I to relive even a mere 108 fictionalised minutes of the Bush years. I also knew that this political melodrama ? about CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson's persecution by White House operatives ? would not conclude with the same teletyped litany of names, outcomes, convictions and sentences that brought All The President's Men to its deafeningly triumphant conclusion. This time the bad guys walked.
But the weirdness attendant upon seeing recent events on the big or small screen is amplified here by the choice of director for Fair Game. Doug Liman helped reinvent the action-thriller with The Bourne Identity, though credit also belongs to Paul Greengrass, who handled the two sequels, and contributed to the burgeoning post-9/11 genre with United 93. In 2005 Liman ? of no fixed identity as a director ? also made Mr And Mrs Smith, about married top-secret assassins, a premise that prefigures Fair Game so neatly it almost neuters it at the conceptual level before a single shot of the latter is in the can. And by now, of course, Liman is meeting Greengrass on territory the Englishman has firmly established as home turf ? not least in his overlooked Green Zone, which hums and pops a lot more than Fair Game.
Casting has a lot to do with how odd many of these movies make me feel. I had barely got used to Penny Johnson Jerald's purringly sexy Lady Macbeth shtick in 24 when she showed up playing Condi Rice in both the rightwing ABC-TV mini series The Path To 9/11 and the cheap-ass quickie DC 9/11: Time Of Crisis. And The Last Picture Show's long-AWOL Timothy Bottoms, who played George Bush in the latter, had previously essayed the role of W ? as party-hearty, cheerfully dimwitted farceur ? in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's sitcom, Where's My Bush? Josh Brolin, who was indelible as the swaggering Preznit in Oliver Stone's W, had recently seen his own father James in The Reagans, a TV mini series Gipper-idolators found very offensive.
There's also a tit-for-tat quality to a lot of this: Oliver Stone's chumpy W versus the strong-jawed big-swinging-dick of 9/11: Time Of Crisis, for instance. And a long-gestating, right-wing revisionist TV-drama on the Kennedys (as tomcatting bootleggers) seems like delayed payback for The Reagans. It even extends to the reviews. The Washington Post, which allowed columnist Robert Novak to expose Plame in its pages, denounced Fair Game on the op-ed page, calling it "full of distortions," which is pretty much what Joe Wilson said in his New York Times "review" of Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, back when all this started.
I wonder if he and his wife were as reluctant to relive all this as I was?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/26/fair-game-revisits-bush-years
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