How many spies do you know? How many spies do you know played by Naomi Watts?
Fair Game is the kind of film that expects to incite passion and outrage. By every token, it should. It centers on two gravely wronged people—Valerie Plame Wilson (Naomi Watts) and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn)—whose careers were destroyed when their opinions conflicted with the George W Bush administration’s agenda.
Bush and company wanted to find weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to justify their invasion of the country. But Plame Wilson and her fellow CIA operatives couldn’t find them. The vindictive 2003 leak of Plame Wilson’s covert CIA agent status by conservative Washington Post newspaper columnist Robert Novak (who was given her identity by Bush insiders) essentially shelved her career and put her contacts’ lives at great risk (and ultimately led to the Wilsons’ Santa Fe relocation).
As Valerie, Watts is CIA-agent-as-babe, a distinct visual contradiction to our cultural stereotype of spooks as generic, gray-suited men. Her glamorous look and globe-trotting work alone should make Valerie’s story cinema-ready. Unfortunately, Fair Game is not quite the rapid-fire political thriller it sets out to be, despite all of director/cinematographer Doug Liman’s best efforts. The film’s frenzied pace, intercut with TV news clips of the bombing of Baghdad and jaw-flapping TV pundits, gives it a sense of urgency that its often slack, emotionally distanced storytelling can’t match.
Working from a script adapted from both the Wilsons’ memoirs, Liman (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Bourne Identity) seems inspired by the chaotic hand-held camera work and zeitgeisty global landscapes of his previous films.
Valerie is a passive hero, not willing to accept that mantle, just anxious to do her job without interference. For that reason, she’s mostly overshadowed by her hothead husband who rushes to the national media to tell his side of the story. Valerie comes off as more undefined and quixotically motivated, the kind of person who would rather fade into the woodwork. Like Batman, her real identity is a secret, even among her friends, and she shares a similar sense of stoic opacity with that action hero.
A good portion of the film details the nitty-gritty of Valerie and Joseph’s workaday reality: frantic schedules, child-care conflicts, workplace politics. The difficulty of arranging their schedules to accommodate work and children looks nearly equal to the difficulty of being smeared as anti-patriotic commies by the right-wing press and White House. But despite all that privileging of domesticity and the intimate side of the couples’ lives, they feel like less-than-flesh-and-blood people. Even more flat and featureless are the appearances of bold-face look-alikes (Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Ari Fleischer, Karl Rove), which come across as pure kitsch.
Fair Game’s best moments are probably the yuppie dinner parties at which Valerie and Joseph’s know-it-all friends debate Iraq and WMDs and other hot topics of the day. The smug sense of ownership of world events is commonplace in the West, even as stories such as Plame Wilson’s show that the news we receive is often just the tip of the iceberg: Hidden agendas abound. It’s an insight in a film that is largely a rehash of a scandal which, at least in this film version, has little bite.
To read SFR's interview with Valerie Plame Wilson about the film, Click HERE.
Fair Game
Directed by Doug Liman
With Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Bruce McGill, Michael Kelly and Ty Burrell
Opens Friday, Nov. 19
UA DeVargas
108 min., PG-13
Despite having ample opportunities to do so, Joe Wilson never complained about the "sixteen words" in President Bush’s State Of The Union address until almost five months after it was delivered.
And then only after he had met with top Democrat Senators and had signed on with John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
From then on Mr. Wilson promoted a two-fold story to reporters in which he claimed:
We now know thanks to the report on this matter from the bi-partisan US Senate Select Committee On Intelligence that both of these claims were utterly false. (And indeed, the "sixteen words" themselves have turned out to be quite grounded in fact.)
So how is it that some of the most prominent reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere reported Mr. Wilson’s outlandish charges on faith? He does not generally give the impression of being any too trustworthy.
Was it because he had someone who could corroborate his incendiary story? A "second source"? An expert in this very field?
A month before Bob Novak published Valerie Plame’s name and disclosed that she worked at the CIA in a department that monitored weapons of mass destruction, the gossipy Richard Armitage at the State Department already knew all about her.
When asked how he knew about Plame, Armitage said he knew because Joe Wilson was "calling everybody" and telling them. And by "everybody" Mr. Armitage certainly meant reporters.
With that in mind it is an easy step to suppose that it was Mr. Joseph C. Wilson IV himself who first "outed" his wife as a CIA officer.
And, as Mr. Armitage also suggested, Wilson did so because he didn’t want to be dismissed as some "low-level guy." He wanted to buttress his wildly outrageous (and we now know fallacious) claims against a then popular President at the height of a then popular war.
And what better way to do so than to produce the person who sent him on his mission, and who witnessed the events unfold — his own wife, who just happened to be an expert on weapons of mass destruction.