Film: Fair Game
Cast includes: Naomi Watts (21 Grams), Sean Penn (Mystic River)
Direction: Doug Liman (Bourne Identity)
Genre: Historic Based Drama (2010)
Based on Fair Game by Valerie Plame and The Politics of Truth by Joseph Wilson
In brief: Her “business” travels regularly took her to places like Kuala Lumpur, Cairo and Amman. No one in these places knew her as Valerie Plame; she had a variety of aliases and cover stories. As a CIA covert operative, she had a vital role in shutting down some nasty terrorist networks. And she was good at her job. Back home, her cover story was that of an average working mom with a boring job with a lot of business travel. Her husband, Joe Wilson, a former ambassador, knew she worked for the CIA but was in the dark about the secrets that kept her up nights. At dinner parties, Joe was apt to fly off the handle at their friend’s anxiety about terrorists and the media’s drumbeat of yellow/orange/red daily threat levels… leaving Valerie the job of making apologies.
Valerie’s promotion in 2002 to a joint task force on Iraq meant she’d be working to uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program. What about that rumor that Saddam had purchased 500 tons of “yellow cake” uranium from Niger? A colleague asked Valerie if her husband might be willing to check that one out for them. Joe knew the country, the people and the language. The agency vetted and approved him for the assignment. Joe’s findings debunked the rumor for several reasons, which he explained in his report. The CIA thanked him for his efforts. His report would be combined with others, analyzed and added to the information pool. His disappointment was palpable when he learned that he was just a “tiny mini-cog in a big machine,” as Valerie put it. Naturally, those 16 words in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech about “significant quantities of uranium from Africa” came as a surprise. Which African country was Bush talking about, Joe wondered. Upon learning that it was Niger, Wilson tried and failed to get the government to correct their statement. Finally he sent a letter to the New York Times, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” What kind of response was he expecting from the Bush administration? Certainly not the one he got.
Valerie Plame’s memoir, Fair Game: My life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, was finally released after CIA clearance in October 2007 and became the starting point for this movie. While there’s a lot we already know about this story, most of our knowledge comes from a feeding frenzy of media coverage… some true, some partly true but much of it patently untrue. Fair Game, the movie, is an entertaining, well crafted narrative that holds our attention, even though we know many of the important plot points. While it’s a story about specific people, caught up in specific events, it should serve as a cautionary tale about how all of us take in and analyze information that comes our way. Getting to the truth doesn’t mean making a stew out of all the bits of information, rumors and opinions, stirring up the stew and cherry picking the morsels we want. Getting to the truth is hard because truth rarely comes in tidy sound bites. While Valerie Plame was reluctant to buck the system, Joe Wilson felt passionately that a democracy cannot function without truth… no matter where it leads.
3 popped kernels
Well acted, suspenseful telling of a story we thought we knew
Popcorn Diary
Primary Audience: Grown-ups
Gender Appeal: Any audience
Distribution: Mainstream limited release
Mood: Neither upbeat nor somber
Tempo: Cruses comfortably
Visual Style: Unvarnished realism
Character Development: Engaging
Language: True to life
Social Significance: Informative
