The episode implicated the last Bush White House and led to the federal court conviction of a high-ranking official in the administration. There was outrage over the outing of the identity of previously covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Ironically, the former undercover operative hasn’t been shy about hyping a major motion picture about herself. Last month in D.C., she eclipsed even the famous Hollywood stars involved, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, to promote “Fair Game.”
No wonder Plame would do that. Based on her eponymous book and her husband’s “The Politics of Truth,” today’s political thriller presents her as a martyr.
One day she was a humble, veteran spy-analyst thwarting rogue nuclear proliferation. The next day she is a humiliated, professionally castrated victim of a punishing executive branch and a hotheaded spouse.
Plame’s sanctification as a persecuted do-gooder may even be accurate. But director Doug Liman’s slack depiction, with its reductive script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and generic Watts performance, isn’t nearly as provocative as the historic Washington scandal.
As alleged at the time and in the movie, Plame’s outing was a calculated act of retaliation. It was meant to discredit her husband Joe Wilson, who publicly undermined the administration’s justification to start the Iraq war. After investigating Iraq’s lack of access to African yellow cake uranium, the expert former diplomat Wilson debunked the war hawks’ “weapons of mass destruction” argument.
Wilson, played by an uncharacteristically unfocused Penn, couldn’t resist writing the New York Times op-ed piece heard ’round the world. The screenplay illustrates the vital intelligence work Plame was doing before that and details the devastating aftermath for her career, her cases, and for her compromised contacts in the field. It also shows the toll it took on her marriage.
As much as the movie indicts then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff Scooter Libby (David Andrews) and others in the conspiracy, it also shows how her husband put patriotism — or, perhaps, his own ego — over what would have been best for his wife and family.
But this underwritten, one-dimensional Plame is bloodless. She easily forgives Wilson, keeps her mouth shut to protect the agency even after it shuns her, etcetera, etcetera.
It is good to see the great Sam Shepard on screen again, as Plame’s father. But otherwise, “Fair Games” works only as a passable civics lesson in abuse of power for the multiplex.
