When I was growing up, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was assumed by all good liberal-leftie thinking people — like me — that the CIA were the bad guys, and that exposing CIA agents was a public service. This true-life spy thriller, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), shows how times have changed. Its blonde heroine, Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), is a CIA agent; and, for the first half of the film, the CIA are the good guys, pitted against the hawkish baddies of a George W Bush administration eager to go to war with Saddam Hussein.
Here’s another curious twist: Plame’s secret CIA cover is blown not by some antiwar whistle-blower, but, according to the film, by “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who leaked information to journalists. In other words, leading figures in the Bush administration do a Julian Assange — and we’re all meant to be morally outraged.
And finally, Plame was outed not by one of those Fox News nasties, but by the great liberal-leaning Washington Post, famous for bringing down Nixon in the Watergate affair. So here’s a film with a female CIA agent who is fighting for the truth — that is, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — and here’s The Washington Post in the role of the government’s stooge. All the President’s Men, indeed.
Fair Game is one of those “We wuz lied to over the war in Iraq” films. (There are those, like The Washington Post, that claim it’s more a case of “We wuz lied to by a Hollywood film”, so great is the number of what it deems its inaccuracies.) That the American public, along with the rest of the world, was misled about Saddam’s weapons is not going to surprise or shock many people.
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That said, Liman’s film provides a fascinating look behind the headlines and the hype that preceded the build-up to war. It casts illuminating light on the mindset and motives of the key players who took America into battle. We see a Bush administration that needed a smoking gun — weapons of mass destruction — to get guns smoking. It was Plame’s job to find out what was really going on with Iraq’s weapons programmes. What she finds makes her, and her CIA bosses, sceptical about Saddam’s weaponry. When the CIA is leant on by Bush’s people, however, it gets with the programme.
Plame is clearly doing a difficult and dangerous job, but then her husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), sees Bush on television claiming Saddam had tried to purchase a huge amount of uranium from Africa. Wilson, who had earlier been sent there on a fact-finding mission by the CIA, knows this to be false — and writes a piece for The New York Times saying as much. Then the White House wants to “change the story”, so it goes after Wilson’s wife, who is considered “fair game”, and blows her cover. This puts her Iraqi contacts and herself in jeopardy, and ends her CIA career, but she refuses to speak out. Her husband insists that they fight back by going public with the truth — and they end up fighting each other.
Fair Game works best as a political thriller, a chilling portrait of the Bush/Cheney administration and the dirty tricks and deceptions it carried out. Newsreels of the president’s so-called factual case for war leave you feeling duped. It’s the private drama of what happens when Plame is exposed that comes across as thin. I wish Jez and John-Henry Butterworth’s intelligent screenplay had gone into more detail. It skips over vital facts such as whether Wilson told his wife about his intention to go public with an article he must have known would have bad consequences. Also, why do we always see Joe at home with the kids, while his wife is off doing spy things? Couldn’t they afford childcare? Liman wants to portray the couple as heroic whistle-blowers, and they are that; but likeable? Not really. Wilson is incredibly self-righteous, and Plame is a dull workaholic devoted to the CIA. Watts and Penn never get anything — love, hate, sexiness — going on screen. They don’t seem like married people, more like work colleagues who are fond of each other. We don’t make an emotional connection with them, so, when the marriage looks like it’s on the rocks, it’s hard to really care.
It’s as if Liman wants all our emotions — our anger, our passion — reserved for the politics of the story. Thus, we get a passionate call to civic responsibility and taking a stand in the defence of truth, conveyed in an unnecessary and hectoring lecture from Wilson to students at the end of the film. It’s ironic that a movie criticised by some commentators for being so false should demand such a commitment to truth.