'Fair Game' much more than anti-Bush tirade

Consider this a “family first” film.

If Doug Liman's fact-based “Fair Game” had been just another political tirade against the Bush administration for outting CIA agent Valerie Plame, it would be old news and old outrage.

Not here.

Liman tells a virtual horror story about an American family under siege, and how a wife and husband, mother and father, slogged through economic, social and political hell to save their marriage, family and reputations.

In 2003, Bush officials leaked information to reporter Robert Novak who then identified Plame (played by Naomi Watts) as a covert CIA operative, ending her career and — in this story — causing key Iraqi scientists to vanish or be killed.

This act came as retribution against Plame's outspoken husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn, whose brows are so furrowed you could plant corn in them), a former U.S. ambassador who wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times, charging the Bush administration's reasons for going to war were falsified.

The administration, represented by David Andrews as Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, deflects Wilson's assault by letting loose the dogs of war reporters, among them Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell and Fox news.

“Fair Game” is a streamlined, Hollywood movie that works like an epic domestic drama rather than an international thriller, although Liman shot quick scenes in Paris and Baghdad on the sly.

Liman directs “Fair Game” with oodles of energy, yet, it's much more restrained than his stunt-packed “Bourne Identity” and his other married couple spy film “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.”

Here, Liman picks up the camera for the first time since his thriller “Go” and shoots “Fair Game” in a fluid, hand-held, documentary mode that occasionally threatens to drift into motion-sickness excess.

Penn and Watts share a palpable chemistry that captures the underlying strength of the characters to survive, barely, the pressures attempting to draw and quarter them.

At the same time, Penn and Watts (in their third silver screen pairing) don't sugarcoat the conflict between a married couple who could easily fall into blaming each other for events beyond their control.

Highlight of the movie: Andrews' slick performance as Libby. As the man who took the fall for the Bush administration, Andrews trades in classic villainy for snakelike, self-righteous certitude.

He's a real-life Darth Vader, without the lightsaber.

“Fair Game” opens at the River East, Century Centre and ICON Showplace in Chicago, and at the Evanston 18. Rated PG-13. 106 minutes. Three-and-a-half stars.