As far as political scandals go, I find the Valerie Plame affair to be especially intriguing, and not only because I have a soft spot for female covert operatives who face the dilemma between patriotism and family. The Plame debacle (in which her identity as a CIA operative was leaked by a source in the White House in 2003 after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, publicly torpedoed the administration’s claims that Iraq had been trying to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger) reveals an intense anxiety that the rule of law’s sway over political action is merely a thinly-veiled sham over petty vendetta and ideological crusading. It makes visible the presidency in its most imperial form: embarrassing those in charge could result in the full force of governmental vengeance grinding you into the dust.

Fair Game, scripted by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and directed by Doug Liman, lenses the affair through Plame (Naomi Watts) and Wilson (Sean Penn), framing the couple as unfortunate collateral damage in the Bush Administration’s ramrod approach to the Iraq War, the protagonists of a political thriller who are under attack for making a principled stand for the objective truth against the obfuscating power of the ideologues in charge. Plame is painted as a hypercompetent operative and case officer (she just wants to do her job, damn it!) while Wilson contains more shades of grey: the energy driving his one-man war vacillates from a fight for the truth into personal insecurity and the need to be the smartest man in the room.

The rapport that the couple forges from these clashing dynamics is what grounds the film, as in an early scene where a night out with friends turns tense with the injection of political discussion. Plame is far more of an expert than anyone else at the table, but must plead ignorance because of her cover; Wilson, on the other hand, stokes the fires, and with a masterful cut to the next scene, they discuss the aftermath during the drive home. Plame takes her husband to task for calling one of their friends a “racist pussy,” and in their little debriefing, we get the sense that she knows he can be an antagonistic jackass, but he’s also right, and he won’t back down from it.

It’s a microcosm of the entire film, and actually one of its subtler moments. The first half of the film is tightly focused with Plame’s operations at the CIA and the political pressure that the White House is placing on the agency for favorable interpretations of the data; we don’t need any knowledge of the history to feel the inevitable collision looming ahead. But after the leak breaks and Plame is unceremoniously burned as an agent and Wilson becomes vilified as a “Democrat stooge and anti-war zealot”, the film fragments under pressure and leans on blatant imagery and on-the-nose dialogue, as when the CIA Deputy Director Jim Pavitt (Bruce McGill) nods at the White House and tells Plame “Those few men in that building over there are the most powerful men in the history of the world!”

Without the sharp focus of the first half, the movie peters out in a collage of events that we only know is approaching the end because Wilson’s speaking engagements have larger audiences and more grandiose invocations of American Democracy and Fighting for the Truth. The little details and the individual scenes work — Plame’s heart-to-heart with her father Sam (Sam Shepard)  is beautifully restrained — but the film doesn’t trust its audience to understand the implications of what we’ve seen unless it ties everything together with a blatant call to arms. For a film that’s about finding the truth in the details, that kind of heavy-handedness is a disservice.

(The Film School Thesis Statement Generator says: “Through the strategic use of narrative ellipses, Fair Game masks the plight of the migrant worker in post-war America.” Hmm, there was that Iraqi doctor, her struggle subordinated to and made a consequence of this political slapfight…)