Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sun Nov 07, 2010 8:17 pm 
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Naoimi Watts and Sean Penn in Fair Game

The story of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame

"Fair game": that's how Karl Rove described covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, who was outed (and thus robbed of her career) by instigation of the Bush administration after her husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote a New York Times op-ed article revealing that President Bush's State of the Union address had contained information he knew to be false about Iraqi purchases of uranium to justify the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This film is the story of Wilson, his wife, and the machinations of the Bush administration. It's one of the very few fully successful anti-Iraq war movies, because it's smart, accurate, and not preachy. It's occasionally strident, but the stridency is entirely embedded in the authentic voice of Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn). Just about everything in Fair Game, including Wilson's bluster, is plain fact. The movie actually reveals more than the press accounts, not only about the minute-by-minute story of this scandal and details of Joe Wilson's role, but surprising revelations of Valerie Plame Wilson's dangerous and important work as an undercover CIA operative.

First this is a story about the falsified run-up to Iraq. Next it is an account of how a married couple fought the powers that be (and also each other) in the irrational and belligerent atmosphere of Bush-era Washington. Most significantly it is a revelation of how the executive branch severely punished American citizens for being whistleblowers. (There is clear evidence this is still going on under the new administration.) Fair Game is hardly a fun movie, and despite fine acting, not always a stylish one. The Middle Eastern sequences are standard issue. There is a hectic drive through a Baghdad combat zone that seems tacked on. But by sticking to the facts of a case that's telling and significant, Doug Liman has made a smart and truthful movie that will engage political junkies and still-angry opponents of the Iraq war.

What happened is complicated, yet it's all laid out quite clearly in the first half hour. First come the aluminum tubes bought by Iraq. Bush administration functionaries insist they were going to be used for uranium centrifuges. CIA experts, at meetings Valerie Plame is involved in, debunk this claim. Next there is the matter of yellowcake ("enriched") uranium concentrate used in making nuclear bombs. The CIA sent Wilson to Niger where Iraq was alleged to have purchased large quantities of the yellowcake. Wilson had experience of several African countries and high-level contacts in Niger. He found no evidence that any large quantities of yellowcake uranium had been moved out of Niger.

Meanwhile -- one thing that's new information for most of us -- we see Valerie Plame (superbly played by Naomi Watts) at work in the field. She has dangerous missions tracking down illicit traders in weapons and working with agents. One of her missions is to make sure Iraq does not obtain nuclear weapons. She confronts an Iraqi scientist who's teaching incognito in Cairo. Later she persuades a doctor working in the US, Dr. Zahraa (played by Israeli actress Liraz Charhi), to visit her physicist brother Hammad (Egyptian actor Khaled Nabawy) and ask him fifty questions about the Iraqi nuclear program. He virtually laughs in her face, saying there has been no Iraqi nuclear program since the early Nineties, and that the Americans very well know this. Later, Plame tries to arrange for Hammad and a group of colleagues to escape Iraq as the US attack begins. She argues they're "the real weapons of mass destruction," because they'll simply go and build WMD's for America's enemies elsewhere if not brought to the States.

Scenes of the cigar-smoking Joe Wilson and Valerie socializing with their friends show Joe to be a blowhard spoiling for a fight. Retired from his diplomatic career, with an independent consulting gig that's not a huge success, he's a bit at loose ends. His wife Valerie has an important job that frequently takes her to far-off and dangerous destinations Joe isn't even authorized to know about. Joe winds up caring for their two young kids and learns from post-its that Valerie is off to "Cleveland." (She's really gone to Cairo.) After he's incensed by the Bush-Cheney run-up to Iraq (chronicled by many news clips shown on in-scene TV's), he publishes the Times op-ed piece debunking the State of the Union speech's claims about non-existent nuclear weapons production -- the alleged uranium purchase. A week later an article by the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak July 14, 2003 about Wilson's trip and his increased criticism of the administration's claims to justify the invasion casually mentions that Wilson's wife was a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction."

With this exposure, Plame is quickly eliminated from the agency -- ending a 20-year career there. The film shows how sudden and painful this was and how coldly her superiors rebuffed her efforts to have the rescue of the Iraqi scientists carried out. All her contacts were blown. She struggles to keep things quiet. Her women friends remain friendly. Joe becomes a public figure. He knows revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative is against the law, and he points to Karl Rove. We know, and the film shows, that the person charged with punishing Wilson by exposing his wife was Rove's underling "Scooter" Libby. After decades of secret work, Joe's very public TV appearances and lectures go against the grain for Valerie and their marriage is on the rocks. The film shows how sudden and painful this was and how coldly her superiors rebuffed her efforts to have the rescue of the Iraqi scientists carried out.

From a variety of points of view Joe Wilson's behavior is questionable. He's an ambiguous kind of hero. Maybe most real-life heroes are. Diplomats aren't supposed to "play" the press. The movie's last section includes Penn giving a rousing speech to college students. It shows Valerie and Joe reunited. "You did good," she says. And in spite of everything, he did.

In some of the scenes of Hammad and the other Iraqi scientists, Iraqi Arabic is spoken, a relative rarity in Hollywood movies. The Middle Eastern scenes are, nonetheless, as slapdash and unconvincing as such sequences in other American films, such as the clumsy and inaccurate Rendition. But it seems like Liman and his writers, Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who worked from Joe's Politics of Truth and Valerie's Fair Game, are spot-on in their depiction of the beleaguered couple and their story as at once casualties and heroes of the Iraq war. True to its factual nature, the movie ends with a cameo of the actual Valerie Plame Wilson testifying in 2007 to the House Oversight Committee hearing-- in which she declares that her identity and job were revealed by the administration for "purely political reasons." Thanks to Penn, Watts, and a restrained Doug (Bourne Identity) Liman, this is a good film for what it does not do -- scream and shout or overdramatize. However it gets lost in detail and becomes repetitious toward the end. It is so close to the minutiae of those days and years and those two lives that it never really sings cinematically. Justin Chang of Variety is basically right that Fair Game has "impeccable politics" but "not quite enough solid drama." But the politics matter, and rarely come through with such clarity in an American movie these days.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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