The political movie of the season is Fair Game, the story (true?, almost true?, embellished?, fictional?) story of the outing of Valerie Plame. Here is my review:
Fair Game (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts) – From the genre of well-known, real-life news events that are made into movies we get Fair Game, the story of the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Plame, you’ll remember, was a super-spy who both ran teams of agents doing espionage in other countries and served as an operative herself. As played by Naomi Watts, Plame approached the CIA and passed the tests at “spy school” with flying colors. In the ensuing years, she rose through the ranks to running high-profile projects all the while leading a seemingly normal life as the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn) and their two young children.
Watts’ Plame is tough yet loving, sensitive but cold. While she says that she puts her family first, she often leaves home for days without explanation even to her husband who knows about her job. For those who lived in a cave in the early to mid-2000s, Wilson was asked by the CIA (with no remuneration) to go to his old stomping grounds in Africa (Niger, specifically) to assess whether rumors were true that Niger sold “yellowcake,” a critical ingredient to nuclear weapons, to Saddam Hussein. Using his many contacts, he concludes there is no truth to the rumors, writes his report and moves on to his consulting practice. Imagine his surprise when President George W. Bush utters 16 words in his State of the Union message saying that British Intelligence has reported that Hussein purchased vital nuclear material from Africa.
The premise of the movie is that the White House was angry about Wilson’s report in the midst of their own embarrassment that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the invasion. To get even and to divert attention away from the lack of WMD and the lack of success in the war, Vice President Dick Cheney’s deputy, Scooter Libby, leaks Plame’s name and CIA cover to veteran (now deceased) journalist Robert Novak. Livid, Wilson goes public about his report, the senselessness of the Iraq war, and his outrage over the disclosure about his wife. Plame, meanwhile, becomes persona non grata within the agency, receives death threats, and truly becomes the spy who comes out of the cold. The movie depicts the family and public crises the family faces in the aftermath of the revelation.
The film is superbly acted but is somehow lacking in depth. The most engrossing part of the film occurs before the revelation as we see Plame at her competent best within the CIA (was she really this good?). It bogs down in the most political parts of the movies as the familiar anti-Bush sentiment comes out. In that sense, Penn and his own politics are not assets to the movie even though his acting is. We are left not sure if we have heard the real or whole story. But there is no denying that what Libby, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and perhaps others did (Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were accused but not charged) in “outing” Plame was both illegal and unethical. If you like political films, you will want to see Fair Game, which is also the name of Plame’s best-selling book.