WaPo – Sean Penn Movie “Fair Game” Full Of Lies

During Thanksgiving weekend I went to see the movie REDS with Bruce Willis. Awesome movie and I highly recommend it. But during the trailers they showed the movie FAIR GAME with Sean Penn, supposedly based on the Plame/Wilson affair. I groaned when I saw it.

It appears my groan was warranted. Here is the WaPo: (h/t Dan Riehl)

In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.

And as is usual with these liberal vanity pieces the numbers don’t look so hot. It cost 22 million to make and since opening one month ago it has taken in 7.3 million domestically and another 5 million worldwide. Receipts continue to fall, down 32% this weekend. This movie will be lucky to get its money back.

Hollywood has a very skewed idea of what the public wants to see when it comes to movies like this. They’ve sunk mega money into anti-war, anti-Bush movies because they believe the movie going public MUST think like they do in their insulated left leaning world. Rendition, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Green Zone….all money losers.

But they still insist on making these kind of POS movies.

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.

Sean Penn paints the Bush administration as power-mad schemers and the Wilsons as some kind of courageous patriots. Yeah, would call that facts willfully ignored and a revision of history.

Curt

See author page