‘Fair Game,’ based on book & real life, stars Naomi Watts & Sean Penn

If you weren't scrutinizing the intel debacles leading up to the Iraq war, your first exposure to Valerie Plame might have been her glam Vanity Fair cover shot.

She posed next to ambassador husband Joe Wilson, and the two of them looked like a D.C. power couple a little too ready for their close-up.

Plane had been outed as a CIA agent, but seated in Wilson's vintage Jaguar convertible, behind a pair of Foster Grants, you wondered . . . was she a real spy?

She didn't even look like a real blond.

Now, along comes "Fair Game," based on Plame's book, and if you haven't read it, Doug Liman's new docudrama gives you a definitive answer: yes, Plame (Naomi Watts) was a real spy, and disgracefully treated when her husband decided to publicly challenge the Bush administration's tortured (pardon the pun) use of CIA intelligence before the Iraq invasion.

"Fair Game" starts with a lengthy prologue that establishes Plame's bona fides as a covert operative, working undercover in Pakistan and other locales to intercept potential WMD terrorists.

Husband Joe (Sean Penn) doesn't know the details, but he sees the residue of these dangerous missions - she tosses and turns with nightmares, wears the bruises of physical encounters.

Meanwhile, "Fair Game" gives insight into Wilson's personality, and he's a little less heroic. We see Wilson as a self-righteous blowhard at dinner parties, proudly declaring that he doesn't mind being an "a-hole" if it means setting the record straight. When he catches the administration fudging his personal research into reports of Niger's uranium sales to Iraq, his record-straightening causes a firestorm.

This is shrewd use of Penn, whose own heat-seeking activism and anti-Bush politics might have clouded "Fair Game," but in this case reinforce Wilson's overeagerness to pick a fight.

It's Wilson's rash move to single-handedly challenge the Bush administration in the New York Times that leads to a vicious PR counteroffensive from Bush adviser Karl Rove and Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby (David Andrews). A conservative columnist outs Plame, endangering colleagues and active missions, and it's just round one in a lengthy (and mostly one-sided) PR brawl between Wilson and Rove.

The story has all the potential to infuriate - Plame is a good soldier unfairly attacked, and her exposure results in the death of Iraqi agents.

So why doesn't "Fair Game" boil the blood? The movie is often a curiously bland, unemotional affair, as if the political seriousness of the material muffled Liman's gifts as an entertainer.

He's done great spy movies ("The Bourne Identity") and clever movies about the domestic lives of spies ("Mr. and Mrs. Smith"), but he seems to operate here on the assumption that fact-based drama requires unwavering sobriety.

Liman's hung up on making everything look dully "real." He photographs "Fair Game" in that blanched digital look that filmmakers love so much (but I sure don't), and waves around a handheld camera to give things a "you are there" feel. But if I were there, I'd tell the photo director to settle down.

And, much as I like Watts, she's a little anesthetized, offering zombie shock as Plame's overriding response to the scandal that pulls her marriage and family apart.

The movie's best performance, ironically, comes from longtime supporting player Andrews as Libby. His interrogation and bullying of CIA analysts make for cracklingly good scenes, setting forth the administration's 1 percent doctrine and its tragic hubris.