The Unwitting Pawn

I didn’t know much about Valerie Plame before watching Doug Liman’s Fair Game – the real-life, partly fictionalized story of the outed CIA covert agent – and I can’t say I’m all the wiser after having seen it, really.

That is not to say in any way that the movie doesn’t get its message across, that being the story of how Plame, an as-portrayed effective company woman, got the shaft and then some by members of the Bush administration dead-set on going to war in Iraq.

Fair Game is set in a post-Sept. 11 world, obviously, a time of fear and miscommunication – a time of chaos.

Plame, whom we first meet while on a undercover mission in Malaysia, is trotting the world collecting intelligence on a lead that Saddam Hussein has or is attempting to buy uranium yellowcake. The task also takes her to Egypt and Jordan and often keeps her deep in the bowels of the agency where she and her colleagues try to make sense of the data collected.

Her job as an operative is so involved she and her husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), a former U.S. ambassador, often don’t see each other. They communicate via Post-Its. He knows what she does, but she can’t and won’t compromise that in any way, which frustrates and scares him.

That’s the job (being away from her husband and her family is part of it), and she’s quite good at it.

Eventually, at one point during the investigation, Plames is asked whether the well-connected Wilson could travel to Niger to report on the Hussein-yellowcake connection. She talks him about it; he agrees to investigate after meeting with her superiors. She doesn’t have the power to just send her husband or anyone on a fact-finding mission anywhere.

It turns out to be all for naught because when Wilson comes back with a “No” on the connection, it soon becomes evident all the White House wants to hear – the Office of the Vice President, specifically – is “Yes.” Because they’ll turn any negative into a positive, anyway, y’ know...to justify their campaign for war. Which is not quite the kind of positive thinking you’d expect; I mean, this life or death, not some minor budgetary hurdle, right?

Outraged by the lies, Wilson decides to write an op-ed piece for The New York Times revealing what he hadn’t find in Niger, essentiatilly saying that the Bush administration had, indeed, manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to go after Hussein.

What follows, and, in fact, followed was headline news in 2003: payback.

The OVP leaked Plame’s identity through a counterpoint piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, effectively changing the question of why the country was going to war to just who is Valerie Plame, destroying her career and unraveling her life in the process.

Clever move, huh...quite Machiavellian, alright.

Fair Game, as political a hot potato as it is, is, from my point of view, a pretty good movie that because of its plot’s intricacies I have to talk about as such. The stakes aren’t...high. The drama hasn’t been embellished by some danger Plame has to conquer to save the day.

The cost of the conflict is all-too-real, so it’s all about the performances, and Watts shines as a steely woman wronged in the most definitive way she could be, not by a man but by a system she supported. You know what I mean? And Penn, well...he’s outrage personified and provides the kind of strong, yet subdued support that Watts needs to quietly own the movie.

I find it incredible she isn’t getting more buzz out of this one....

My Rating ***

Photo: Summit Entertainment.