Taglines: Wife. Mother. Spy.
Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) is employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, a fact known outside the agency to no one except her husband and parents. She is an intelligence officer involved in a number of sensitive and sometimes dangerous covert operations overseas. Her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, is a diplomat who most recently has served as the U.S. ambassador to Gabon. Due to his earlier diplomatic background in Niger, Wilson is approached by Plame’s CIA colleagues to travel there and glean information as to whether yellowcake uranium is being procured by Iraq for use in the construction of nuclear weapons. Wilson determines to his own satisfaction that it is not.
After military action is taken by George W. Bush, who justifies it in a 2003 State of the Union address by alluding to the uranium’s use in building weapons of mass destruction, Wilson submits an op-ed piece to The New York Times, claiming these reports to be categorically untrue.
Plame’s status as a CIA operative is subsequently revealed in the media, the leak possibly coming from White House officials, including the Vice President’s chief of staff and national security adviser, Scooter Libby, in part to discredit her husband’s allegation that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. As a result, Plame is instantly dismissed from the agency, leaving several of her delicate operations in limbo and creating a rift in her marriage.
Fair Game is a biographical spy drama film directed by Doug Liman and starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It is based on Valerie Plame’s memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, and Joseph C. Wilson’s memoir, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.
Naomi Watts stars as Plame and Sean Penn as her husband, Joseph C. Wilson. It was released in 2010 and was one of the official selections competing for the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. The film won the “Freedom of Expression Award” from the National Board of Review. The film marked Watts’ and Penn’s third collaboration, having previously co-starred in the films 21 Grams and The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
Film Review for Fair Game
It seems to come down to this: The Bush administration had decided to go to war in Iraq. Scrambling to find reasons to justify the war, it seized on reports that the African nation of Niger had sold uranium to Iraq. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, was sent to seek evidence. He found none. In fact, he found such sales would have been physically impossible.
His report was ignored. We went to war. The non-existent uranium sales were cited. He wrote an article in the New York Times reporting on what he found, or didn’t find, in Niger. In an attempt to discredit him, someone in the administration leaked the information to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.
Cheney’s aide, Scooter Libby, was tried and convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury, sentenced to prison, and his sentence quickly commuted by Bush. Cheney was angry he wasn’t pardoned outright. In the film, we see that Plame, under a variety of aliases, ran secret networks of informants in Bagdad and other Middle Eastern cities. When the administration blew her cover, several of her informants were killed; some reports say 70. Then the Bush spin doctors leaked the story that she was only a CIA “secretary.”
The spinning is still going on. Doug Liman’s “Fair Game,” based on books by Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson and starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, is unusually bold for a fictionalization based on real events. Using real names and a good many facts, it argues: (1) Saddam Hussein had no WMD; (2) the CIA knew it; (3) the White House knew it; (4) the agenda of Cheney and his White House neocons required an invasion of Iraq no matter what, and (5) therefore, the evidence was ignored and we went to war because of phony claims.
Well. That’s what the film says. There will no doubt be dissent. Few people are happy to be portrayed as liars and betrayers. What amazes me is that “Fair Game” doesn’t play the game of using fictional names. They’re all right there, including Cheney personally ordering the intelligence to be falsified.
Naomi Watts looks uncannily like the real life Plame, but that’s beside the point; what I related to was the serious, workmanlike tone of her Plame, who doesn’t see herself as a heroine but as a skilled operative. She has scenes where she devastates other characters with what she knows about them and how she can use that information. Sean Penn plays Ambassador Wilson, more combative than his wife, outraged by the way administration leakers try to destroy them. The film is realistic about the ways the Plame-Wilson marriage almost failed.
What’s effective is how matter-of-fact “Fair Game” is. This isn’t a lathering, angry attack picture. Wilson and Plame are both seen as loyal government employees, not particularly political until they discover the wrong information. The implication is that if the Bush administration hadn’t suppressed their information and smeared them, there might have been no Iraq war, and untold thousands of lives would have been saved.
This topic has been so poisoned by misinformation that a rational discussion seems impossible. I suppose the question becomes, how well does “Fair Game” work as a movie? I suspect it will work better the more you walk in agreeing with it. The portrait it paints of the Wilson-Plame marriage is a very personal one, based on conflicting personalities under pressure. Penn plays Wilson as a hotheaded idealist, fueled by outrage. Watts makes Plame an ideal spy: secretive, concealing, under the radar. Perhaps she would rather her husband had bitten the bullet like a good soldier. They’re surrounded by press attention, and she finds her CIA work belittled by Bush administration spin doctors and her contacts overseas trashed. Joe obviously didn’t prevent the war. If he’d kept quiet, her own CIA work would not have been destroyed.
One interesting element in the movie’s version is the cluelessness of George W. Bush. In this version, it’s possible he didn’t fully realize how flawed his information on Niger was. The svengali is Cheney. That’s the collective narrative that emerges from a group of similar films, like Rod Lurie’s “Nothing But the Truth” and Oliver Stone’s “W.” The implication was that he wanted Scooter pardoned because Scooter was acting on his orders. It’s unlikely Scooter would have been acting on his own.
Fair Game< (2010)
Directed by: Doug Liman
Starring: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Ty Burrell, Michael Kelly, Bruce McGill, Jessica Hecht, Rebecca Rigg, Ashley Gerasimovich, Brooke Smith, Tom McCarthy, Nicholas Sadler, Quinn Broggy, Jenny Maguire
Screenplay by: Jez Butterworth, John Butterworth, Valerie Plame
Production Design by: Jess Gonchor
Cinematography byB Doug Liman
Film Editing by: Christopher Tellefsen
Costume Design by: Cindy Evans
Set Decoration by: Ibrahim Khorma, Sara Parks, Mohammed-Karim Shehabi
Art Direction by: Kevin Bird
Music by: John Powell
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language.
Distributed by: Summit Entertainment
Release Date: November 5, 2010
