Fair Game

The film stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, both fine actors (though sometimes I find it hard to understand Penn - he mumbles), and is about how Bush and Cheney tried to deceive the American public about the Iraq war. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't but this film believes they did and in a way that was totally immoral. They heard, from British intelligence, that Sadam Hussein was going to obtain nuclear material from Niger in Africa; to substantiate this piece of news they sent a man, who had previously been an American ambassador to that country, to find out if the news was true. He found no evidence to prove it; in fact, he was positive that Niger was not in a position to do so. His report was ignored and the war went ahead. The man, played by Sean Penn, wrote an article in The New York Times saying what he knew and this resulted in a leak from the CIA naming the man's wife as a CIA agaent, which she was. This resulted in her world contacts being exposed and in some cases killed.
If I had know all this before I saw the film I might have been more entertained than I was. The film is made in such a "hand-held-camera" style - even when the camera is not being hand-held - that the story is a confusing and confused mess. Only at the end did it seem to work - in retrospect.
Sometimes I wonder if some of the modern American film makers don't know the first thing about story telling: they throw action scenes in to demonstrate how clever they are and they lose the story line. A good dose of Ozu would do them good I feel - he hardly moves the camera at all.
Anyway, I don't believe that America went to war in Iraq on the one detail of the build-up to it that this film highlighted; there were heaps of things that pointed to Hussein's wish to make WOMD. Maybe they were all matters of intelligence failure. But everyone believed tham at the time.
Another film maker some of these whiz-kids of American cinema ought to study is Woody Allen. Now there's a guy who knows how to make films; he puts a story together brilliantly. I have recently seen "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and it is brilliant. And no one in it or making it is trying to push a political point down your throat as "Fair Game" does - and not very successfully either.