From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

When the credits rolled at the end of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I had to double-check that it was, in fact, a Jerry Bruckheimer production. It has a few of his cast regulars (Nicolas Cage, Alfred Molina). Jon Turteltaub, who is quickly becoming his go-to man for summer popcorn-movie silliness, directed it. And yes, there was Bruckheimer’s name listed as producer. With that pedigree and a story of sorcerers zapping lightning bolts at each other all over New York City, why does the film feel so restrained?

Things get off to a shaky start with a narrator spewing out reams of exposition just to set up a prologue. That prologue finds Merlin (James A. Stephens) and Morgana (Alice Krige) hurling magic at each other in the heat of battle. Eventually Merlin is killed but good sorceress, Veronica (Monica Bellucci), traps Morgana’s soul in her own body, forcing yet another good sorcerer, Balthazar (Cage), to imprison them both in a magical doll. In the fracas, evil sorcerer, Horvath (Molina), escapes. This leads to yet more narration where we learn that Balthazar spends the next 1300 years searching for the rightful heir to Merlin. Which brings us to another prologue (that’s right, two prologues) that features Balthazar meeting a ten-year-old boy named David (Jake Cherry) who he believes to be Merlin’s heir. This meeting quickly turns traumatic for the poor kid, with Balthazar revealing himself as a sorcerer and the sudden return of Horvath. In the midst of the ensuing battle, the magical doll goes missing and Balthazar and Horvath are both trapped in a magical urn.

Fast-forward ten years and we’re finally able to start the actual story. Twenty-year-old David (Jay Baruchel) is a physics nerd at NYU. He is clumsy, shy, and awkward, lacking the self-confidence to ask out Becky (Teresa Palmer), the girl he has pined over since the fourth grade. When Balthazar and Horvath are finally released from the urn, they both seek out David to track down the doll containing the imprisoned Morgana. As David learns of his destiny to become a powerful sorcerer, Horvath and Balthazar charge all over the city, hurling balls of light at each other in lifeless CGI sequences.

Despite the story that moves in fits and starts of cumbersome expositional dialogue and action sequences that range from adequate to downright boring, the film nearly succeeds because of the casting and the occasional clever idea. Baruchel is very likable and brings a welcome sense of humor to what could have been a stock nerd role. Cage is fine, but I wish he had let loose a little more. Here is a sorcerer who has spent 1300 years on a quest. It seems to me that a little more of the “crazy Nicolas Cage” would have been justified for the character. Molina brings a sinister charm to his bad guy, making him fun to watch, even if his evil plans fail to hold up to even the slightest bit of logical scrutiny. The real scene-stealer in the film is Toby Kebbell as Horvath’s assistant, Drake Stone. Drake is a sorcerer who was deprived of a proper education, so he turned himself into a megalomaniacal magician in the Criss Angel vein. Kebbell provides a merciless parody of every pretentious magician and sleight-of-hand trickster that has managed to build up his celebrity to the point of ridiculousness. The film could have used more touches like this to show how magic has been corrupted by not just evil practitioners like Horvath, but also by crass show-business types only looking to cash in an easy buck. Sadly, this angle is quickly dropped and Kebbell’s energetic performance eventually gets pushed to the background as the “save the world” plot forces its way to the head of the line.

Even with the occasional bit of creativity — David’s mixing of science and magic in the third act was a nice touch — and a game cast, this is an instantly forgettable film. It’s watchable, but it lacks the ridiculous plotting and over-the-top mayhem of Bruckheimer’s best (and worst) summer spectacles.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Dark Half (1993)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Dark Half was for the “On Cable” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Now Playing on MGM HD

The Dark Half could almost be seen as George A. Romero’s forgotten film. It’s not a part of his well-known Dead series, nor is it one of his engrossing, cheaply made indies like Martin, Knightriders, or The Crazies. Like Creepshow, another of his collaborations with Stephen King, it’s a slick effort to court mainstream success. While that plan didn’t pan out for Romero, he still wound up with a very solid genre picture buoyed by some strong performances.

Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) is a respected novelist and creative writing professor at a college in a picturesque Maine town (never mind that the area surrounding Pittsburgh stands in for New England). With his loving wife, Liz (Amy Madigan) and their twin toddlers, he seems to live a charmed life. In many ways, that would be correct. Never mind that when he was a child, he had surgery for a brain tumor that turned out to be the absorbed fetal remains of his twin that was never to be born. But Thad is unaware of this moment in his life, or the fact that when these remains were cut from his brain, a swarm of hundreds of thousands of sparrows descended on the hospital in a panicked frenzy. No, when we meet Thad, the biggest problem is his life is that he’s being blackmailed by a sleazeball (Robert Joy, chewing every piece of scenery he can fit in his mouth during two short scenes) who has discovered that Thad has been writing trashy, violent crime novels under the pseudonym of “George Stark.” When Thad decides to admit that he’s the man behind the series of novels by Stark, thus ending their run, bad things start happening to the people he knows — namely, the people who supported his decision to symbolically put Stark six feet under.

From this decidedly pulpy setup, Romero turns out a very faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the duality of personality or, to put it more melodramatically, the beast within. For the first hour of the film, Romero wisely keeps the audience guessing as to what is actually happening. Has Stark really manifested himself in the flesh, hurting and killing those close to Thad to force him to begin writing as his alter ego again? Or has Thad gone off the deep end, his personality breaking to allow Stark to take over his body and commit savage, bloody murder? Even when Stark is revealed, it takes some time before the audience can be sure which is the true answer.

The main reason that Romero is able to keep this question going is the casting of Hutton as both Thad and Stark. I almost had trouble believing the same actor played them. Thad looks like Timothy Hutton, a handsome family man with great hair. As Stark, he slicks his hair back and wears subtle makeup prostheses on his face to make him look a little heavier and give him more angular jawbones. The result is a startling similarity to a demonic Michael Keaton. I spent the whole film wondering if Stark actually was Keaton in an uncredited performance. But it was all Hutton, and he’s great in both roles, creating two distinct characters, not just through the help of makeup, but with different accents, speech patterns, mannerisms, and ways of walking.

The supporting cast is uniformly good to the smallest role. Madigan does her usual tough-girl routine, but it fits her character perfectly. Michael Rooker is solid as the no-nonsense Sheriff Pangborn, taking an underwritten role and inflating it with his casually menacing presence. Add to this the presence of great character actors like Julie Harris, Beth Grant, and Royal Dano (in his final film), and you get a cast that can make even the most ridiculous expository hokum sound natural.

Of course, Romero’s main problem over his career is a tendency to write dialogue that’s a little too on-the-nose. While the overarching theme is the duality of personalities, Romero takes what should be the subtext of a good little horror flick and brings it to the surface, forcing the characters to talk through ideas that would best be left to the audience to consider on their own. Still, it’s hard to fault a horror film for daring to have more on its mind than just blood and gore, though there’s enough of that on display, as well.

Oddly enough, after the very grisly and disturbing prologue featuring the discovery of the fetal matter in Thad’s brain, the overt horror elements are the weakest moments in the film. Stark’s rampage tends to be nothing more than cracking a few bad puns, a la Freddy Krueger, before slitting his victims throats with a straight-razor. It’s a lapse of imagination on Romero’s part that takes some of the fun out of the film. Luckily, Romero’s investment in the characters more than makes up for this shortcoming.

For reasons that I am not aware of, the film has a reputation as being a mediocre entry in the Romero canon. Nothing could be further from the truth. It has its moments where it stumbles, but when it counts, The Dark Half delivers as a horror film that refuses to insult the intelligence of its audience.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of It’s Kind of a Funny Story was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

It’s Kind of a Funny Story is a frustrating film. For everything that co-writers/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck get right, they get something just as wrong. For every cliché they avoid, they use another like a crutch. This push and pull between alternately subverting and embracing expectations leaves the film strangely inert — a story with good intentions that fails to completely satisfy as an exploration of mental illness or teenage angst.

Craig (Keir Gilchrist) is a sixteen-year-old bundle of stress, neuroses, and overall anxiousness caused by the sudden pressures of a school for extremely intelligent teens, the high expectations of his Wall Street bigwig father (Jim Gaffigan playing nicely against type), and his obsession with his best friend’s girlfriend Nia (Zoë Kravitz). He’s so stressed out that he vomits anytime he gets nervous and finds himself fantasizing about throwing himself off the Brooklyn Bridge. Scared that his fantasies might lead him to actually commit suicide, Craig checks himself into a mental hospital. But after less than a day, he realizes that he is not nearly as troubled as the schizophrenics and the patients who have actually attempted suicide occupying the ward. When he tries to convince the doctors that he thinks he doesn’t belong and wants to leave, he’s told that he has to stay for at least five days of therapy and evaluation. Will Craig learn important life lessons from his doctor (Viola Davis), edgy but likable patient Bobby (Zach Galifianakis), and pretty but troubled “cutter” Noelle (Emma Roberts)? Do you even need to ask?

Boden and Fleck make some salient points about the unreasonable pressures that teens face not just from parents, friends, and school, but also from their own minds. Craig’s father is constantly after him to apply for a prestigious summer school program that will look great on a college resume, but he’s never made out to be the bad guy. He just assumes that since his son is smart and, since Craig never says anything to the contrary, he should be interested in the same type of corporate world in which he thrives. The same goes for social situations. Craig imagines that his friends really don’t like him and look at him as though he were an alien. But nothing we’re shown supports this theory. Most of Craig’s problems are of his own making. It’s a trite theme, but at least Boden and Fleck approach it with sincerity and a measure of intelligence.

But the plot construct of having Craig learn how to live from people with mental illnesses is pulled straight from the Hollywood playbook of cloying emotional manipulation. While the film acknowledges early on that Craig is a walking cliché of teen angst, I hoped that he would learn this simply from observing the pain of the other patients as they deal with mental issues truly beyond their control. Unfortunately, most of his learning comes from the mouth of Bobby, who spouts philosophical sayings that he has cribbed from Bob Dylan lyrics. While Galifianakis plays Bobby with admirable restraint and acknowledges the obvious irony of Bobby being the most helpful person that Craig encounters, his character still smacks of obvious condescension to the audience. The idea that the sane need to be taught how to live their lives by the insane is just a load of sentimental trash that exists only to make audiences feel good about themselves for watching a film about mental illness. While Bobby is obviously troubled and is occasionally shown to be in pain by the bum hand he’s been dealt by his mind, he’s reduced to a plot device, existing solely to make Craig realize how he needs to take control of his life.

But even with all of my complaints about the way the story is handled, Boden and Fleck manage to cobble together a great cast and get uniformly solid performances out of them. Gilchrist is just the right mix of confused and sympathetic as Craig, while Galifianakis, Roberts, Lauren Graham, Davis, Jeremy Davies, and Aasif Mandvi hit just about every right note in their performances. Combined with the filmmaker’s occasional use of visual flourishes like animation and a musical interlude that works better than it should, the cast nearly makes the film refreshing enough to recommend.

But it’s not. Everyone involved works hard to make the film better than the script, but all their effort is eventually for naught. It’s Kind of a Funny Story could have worked better as a straight drama that takes the material seriously. Instead, the filmmakers try to smooth over the rougher subject matter of mental illness with winking acknowledgement of clichés and audience expectations in the third act. Sorry, but acknowledging clichés doesn’t make them any less lazy.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: I Love You Phillip Morris (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of I Love You Phillip Morris was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Nothing is more frustrating than watching a director make a mess out of a good script. It’s even worse when the director also wrote the script. In the case of I Love You Phillip Morris, the writers/directors, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, had the good sense as screenwriters to let the true story of Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) and Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) play out in all its demented glory. As directors, they fail to trust the audience to understand the inherent comedy of the situations and characters and force a string of juvenile sight gags, an obnoxiously “funny” score, and a pervasive tone of unneeded wackiness onto the film.

When we first meet Steven Russell, he’s a respected policeman in Georgia with a wife (Leslie Mann) and child. By the time the first act ends, he has admitted to his family that he is gay, quit the police force, moved to Florida, become a con man, and gone to prison. There, he meets the love of his life: Phillip Morris. That’s a lot of plot points to hit in less than thirty minutes, yet the script hums along, providing just enough information via Steven’s voiceover narration to color in the details.

It feels like I’ve been hearing about this film for the last five years. I’m sure that’s not true, but ever since Jim Carrey signed on to star in the film, the buzz has surrounded the fact that he and McGregor share several kisses in the film. I find this preoccupation with the sexual orientations of the characters to be sad. If anything, the fact that Steven and Phillip are gay is incidental. Their romance is played as just a relationship with normal ups and downs amplified by Steven’s nearly pathological inability to obey the law or tell the truth.

What’s more interesting about the film are the different scams and prison-escape attempts that Steven cooks up. A delusional soul if ever there was one, Steven lies not just to strangers that he’s scamming and prison officials that he’s duping, but also to Phillip, telling him upon their initial meeting that he’s a lawyer. Steven knows how he wants his life to be; he’s just unable to make that a reality by going through the normal channels. But through ingenuity, a flexible ethical code, and sheer willpower, he’s able to bluff his way into the life that he thinks he deserves for short amounts of time. He’s a fascinating character in the middle of a very twisty story. If only the directors had let the story play out naturally.

Ficarra and Requa make several cringe-worthy moves in the first act. There is the aforementioned “funny” score and sight gags (the most obvious being a cloud that looks like a penis), but the biggest problem in the early going is only partially their fault: Carrey’s performance. Carrey plays his early scenes as though he’s doing another Ace Ventura film. He mugs incessantly, throws his rubbery body and face around like he’s on stage selling it to the back row, and sports a southern accent that is just ludicrous. Ficarra and Requa’s inability to reign Carrey in during these crucial early scenes remains their most glaring problem.

But once Steven winds up in prison and meets Phillip, Carrey’s performance becomes just a shade more subtle. He doesn’t dial it down much, but it’s just enough to make Steven seem more like a calculating con man and less like a buffoon. Unfortunately, Carrey is left to shoulder most of the heavy lifting for the film. McGregor is fine, but his severely underwritten role causes him to disappear for huge chunks of the third act. With no one for Carrey to play off, the film relies too heavily on his voiceovers.

If only Ficarra and Requa had allowed the story to just tell itself, the film would have recovered nicely from Carrey’s shaky first act. But they throw in too many attempts at outlandish humor to match the outlandish story. Some of these bits work (Steven and Phillip slow dancing in their cell while guards beat a prisoner in the next cell), but most of them feel like desperate pleas for the audience to laugh. I would have been more than happy to see these scenes sacrificed in favor of exploring Steven’s relationship with his ex-wife and daughter in more detail or just giving a little more shading to Phillip’s character. The potential is there for Phillip to grow with an already present subplot about Steven casually sliding back into the closet. This obviously frustrates the more effeminate Phillip and is the source of the first real tension between the couple. But this branch of the story is quickly dropped in favor of an insipid scene of Steven trying to play golf for the first time.

There is a fascinating tale at the heart of I Love You Phillip Morris; you just have to wade through a lot of extraneous crap to get there. For that reason, I can’t quite recommend it. It’s entertaining more often than not and definitely surprising, but it never forms into a cohesive whole. It’s a major missed opportunity.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: The Defiled (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Defiled was part of special coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival by The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

What would the world look like to a zombie? That is the question at the heart of writer/director Julian Grant’s ultra low-budget The Defiled, a semi-experimental film that starts out strong before overstaying its welcome and losing focus on its efforts to subvert the zombie genre.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where most people are either dead or have been turned into flesh-eating beasts by a virus, Brian Shaw plays a character who straddles the line between the world of humans who have maintained the ability to think and reason and the zombie creatures who crave flesh and blood. Shaw’s zombie leads a sort of zombie family that includes a wife, a son, and a daughter. The daughter is pregnant, a fact that Shaw’s zombie seems to understand — he treats her like a proudly expectant grandparent. When his family is wiped out after finding and eating the body of a man who was exposed to radiation, Shaw’s zombie delivers the baby from the corpse. After inadvertently saving an uninfected Woman (Kathleen Lawlor) from two other zombies, Shaw’s zombie shares the responsibilities of taking care of the baby with her. Traumatized, the Woman treats the baby as though it were her own, never mind that it is obviously infected with the virus.

Grant is a confident visual stylist, utilizing a cold blue sheen on top of the black and white digital video image. This not only gives the film an otherworldly feel, but also helps to cover up some of the more dodgy makeup and digital effects littered throughout the story. He also makes great use of abandoned, decrepit buildings in the Chicago and Gary, Indiana, area. The locations chosen lend a tremendous sense of atmosphere that the film would not have been able to recreate on its tiny budget.

Shaw also helps the film along with a great performance that is homage to the traditional zombie films of George A. Romero (It’s probably no coincidence that Shaw bears a strong resemblance to the first zombie seen in Night of the Living Dead) while still displaying the human emotions necessary to make his character work in the story. It’s an impressive bit of physical acting.

Unfortunately, the film loses quite a bit of steam after the 30-45-minute mark. Grant’s decision to tell the entire film without dialogue is bold, but eventually causes confusion and contributes to a frustrating lack of forward momentum. This lack of momentum makes the final hour feel tedious and repetitive.

While Grant’s achievement is impressive, what he has created is a very good short film that has a diluted impact because of the attempt to stretch it to feature length. Despite the surprisingly compelling first act, the film runs out of steam long before the final credits roll.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: Shout at the Devil (1976)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Shout at the Devil was for the “On Cable” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

Now Playing on MGM HD

There is a point where a filmmaker can become too ambitious when telling a story. The inclusion of too much plot, too many characters, and a tone that veers wildly from scene to scene can be seen as healthy ambition — an attempt to tell an epic story that feels no need to adhere to mainstream conventions. But often, the disparate elements at play fail to form a coherent whole and the film reaches a tipping point that pushes it into confused absurdity. Such is the case with Shout at the Devil.

Set in Zanzibar during the years leading up to World War I, Sebastian Oldsmith (Roger Moore) is a British citizen on his way to Australia with the idea of making it big in sheep farming. When his money and visa are stolen from his hotel during a brief stop, he finds himself swept into a life of ivory poaching by a drunken American expatriate named Flynn Patrick O’Flynn (Lee Marvin). Of course, the fact that they are killing elephants and stealing ivory on German-controlled land gets them in trouble with Fleischer (Reinhard Kolldehoff), the local German military commander. After several near-misses that nearly find them shot or dangling at the end of a rope, Sebastian and Flynn retreat to Flynn’s estate in a territory controlled by the Portuguese government. There Sebastian meets and falls in love with Rosa (Barbara Parkins), Flynn’s daughter. Eventually, World War I breaks out and the heroes find themselves swept up into the conflict.

Seen from the perspective of someone in 2010, Shout at the Devil is a very jarring movie. There is an elephant massacre played as high adventure. The cheerfulness with which the brutal colonization of Africa by European countries is handled seems a tad tasteless until it is compared to the introduction of Ian Holm in dark makeup as a mute named Mohammed. While that development seems somewhat racist, it’s nothing compared to the fact that many of the native African characters are portrayed as bloodthirsty savages only too happy to murder women and children at the order of Fleischer. By the time an absurd plot twist in the third act requires Sebastian to don black-face, I wasn’t particularly surprised.

Even without my politically correct concerns, the film is a stylistic and tonal mess. Even when the film takes some very grim turns in the second and third acts, Marvin plays Flynn as a robust comic drunk. Overall, it’s an entertaining performance, but it’s not appropriate to several of the later scenes. But this mistake is not necessarily Marvin’s. Director Peter Hunt is unable to handle the transition from comedy to melodrama to suspense that the script calls for.

Most of these problems are caused by the fact that the film tries to tell too much story. This makes not only tonal shifts feel choppy, but also the editing. This is particularly disappointing when you consider that before he became a director, Hunt was an ace action editor who cut the early James Bond films.

There is entertainment value to be found in the film. Marvin and Moore have a fun chemistry in the first half that includes a hilarious fistfight. Likewise, Holm draws some nice laughs out of his hammy performance. But when the film suddenly shifts gears halfway through to become a war/revenge/romantic melodrama, the whole affair falls apart. I don’t like to bash a movie for being too ambitious, but Shout at the Devil feels like three films condensed into one confused, choppy mess.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults: Fair Game (2010)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Fair Game was for the “In Theatres” section of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

There are films where a good director can make a so-so script better. Other times, there are films where a good script bails out a director who is in over his or her head. It’s rare that both instances occur in the same film, but with Fair Game, that’s exactly what happens. Of course, it also helps that the film is expertly cast, keeping it grounded as a personal story of betrayal and eventual triumph.

Following the well-known true story of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), the film tells how Plame, an undercover CIA officer was outed as such by Scooter Libby (David Andrews), Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. This is all recent history and is common knowledge. What is less known is what happened in the months leading up to Plame’s outing and the aftermath of that one destructive act. While the film does bring some of these moments to light, it also spends just a bit too much time focusing on the events that have already been discussed to the point of exhaustion.

Doug Liman is not the name that would spring immediately to mind when deciding on a director for this story. His past output has been a mixed bag. Even his hits (Swingers, The Bourne Identity) have arguably been due to other factors, and not what he brought to the table. But to his credit, he brings a surprising immediacy to the first two acts of Fair Game. Doubling as the cinematographer, he employs a handheld camera for many of the sequences that feature Plame in the field, finding intelligence sources and persuading them to work with the CIA. It’s shown as nerve-wracking work that Plame handles with a detached cool. As the camera closes in on these moments, the tension is ratcheted up, making it clear that Plame was far from the desk jockey that White House officials tried to paint her as in the aftermath of her outing. Liman employs the same technique to enhance the urgency of Plame and her team as they try to turn Iraqi scientists into sources and eventually try to apply the brakes to the Bush administration’s rush to war. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the visual approach taken for the series 24 — it just avoids the ridiculous yelling and histrionics, keeping everything grounded in controlled emotions and cool analysis.

Watts excels in these scenes, imbuing Plame with dignity and a quietly forceful personality. Her cool demeanor while working sometimes bleeds into her personal life, causing stress in her marriage and keeping her from intervening when Wilson launches into verbal tirades against friends when they don’t share his opinions. In the third act, as her world unravels, Watts displays what makes her such a terrific actress. She manages to hold on to the aura of dignity while allowing the pain, fear, and anger to slowly take over her performance. She’s not a woman who is used to being pushed around and it frustrates her to a breaking point, but she is incapable of showing that weakness to anyone, not even allowing her husband to see her face as she confesses to being broken.

Not surprisingly, Penn is the fire to Watts’s ice. But unlike some of his more outlandish performances (21 Grams, Mystic River), he never pushes Wilson into cartoonish territory. Wearing his arrogance as a badge of pride, he’s brash in his public demeanor but quiet and subdued at home. It’s clear that he loves the spotlight but is easily frustrated by the magnifying glass that accompanies it. He also nurses an inferiority streak as he tries to get a struggling business on its feet and has to watch his wife work a dangerous job as the breadwinner in the family. Penn understands these contradictions, and it’s a credit to his performance that he plays them all, never concerned about always being likable. His interpretation of Joe Wilson is a man who may be right but is still kind of a blowhard.

The opening and close of this movie is so strong that it’s a disappointment that the middle act, covering Wilson’s article and Plame’s outing, sags so badly. This isn’t completely the fault of Liman or the writers. The fact is that this part of the story is too well known and lacks any surprises. Watts and Penn pull it through with some fine acting, but I felt like I was watching a hastily put together TV movie about the events, rather than watching Plame and Wilson live out a nightmare.

Most of the surprises come in the third act revelations of the collateral damage done by exposing Plame’s identity. Informants she had been in contact with were placed in danger (since the film is told strictly from Plame and Wilson’s point of view, we never learn exactly what happened to any of her sources), and her marriage nearly ended under the intense media scrutiny and Wilson’s dogged attacks on the Bush administration. It’s at this point that Liman inexplicably pulls his camera back, viewing Plame and Wilson from a distance. Where his urgent visual style elevated the standard cloak-and-dagger story that makes up the first two acts of the film, his cold eye during the third act lets down a script that has started to dig into the tricky question of how far you pursue the truth when that pursuit is destroying your family. Liman’s choice didn’t ruin these moments, but I found it odd to change styles so drastically mid-film when that change offered no apparent impact.

Fair Game emerges as a solid film with some very good acting. As a testament to the courage of Plame and Wilson, it’s effective without ever turning them into saints or martyrs. But beyond the revelations of how much the situation affected their personal lives, it doesn’t illuminate much that was unknown about a shameful abuse of power.

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