So this is what it would be like if James Bond had to change nappies between assassinations. Fair Game tells the true, though larger-than-life story of Valerie Plame, a brainy, blonde American spy who was publicly exposed by the Bush Administration after her husband questioned the existence of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme. But Plame is also the mother of four-year-old twins, and the fallout from her ruined career plays out in the playground as well as the White House.
The movie begins as a thriller, and turns into The West Wing, while delivering a knockout punch to the former Bush regime. Naomi Watts plays CIA agent Plame as a powerful, serious spy, utterly committed to her job. Plame works for the Central Office of Intelligence’s “counter-proliferation” division. Armed with various aliases, crisp white blouses, and a sharp tongue, she zips from Jordan to Kuala Lumpur on the terrorist trail. But when put in charge of finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Plame comes up empty-handed, again and again, and the Administration is not best pleased.
Sean Penn is Plame’s raddled and charismatic husband, the former ambassador Joe Walker, who accuses the Government of lying. Sent on a reconnaissance mission by the CIA, he fails to find any sign of supposed shipments of weapons-grade uranium from Niger to Iraq, and says so in an article in The New York Times headlined “What I didn’t find in Africa”.
All hell breaks loose, and Plame is named in the papers to punish Wilson. With her cover blown, all her covert work abroad falls apart, and her contacts abroad are in danger. While her friends at Washington dinner parties always thought she was in “venture capital”, they’re now asking her if she packs a pistol. During their ill-informed, cabernet-lubricated conversations about Iraq, Plame had always sat in silence, eventually squeaking “Dessert? Coffee?” when the question of WMD came up.
Double lives are always fascinating, but here we see the schizophrenia and agony of telling your husband you’re off to Cleveland as you sneak out of the house at 3.45am and then actually flying to Amman. Plame leaves a Post-It note on the fridge for her husband and the nanny, their main form of communication. “The fridge is like a dead-letter drop,” moans Wilson as she disappears into the night.
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The dialogue is smart in the political scenes, and has a resigned, ironic, natural tone at home, thanks to a script from the British writers John-Henry and Jez Butterworth (of Jerusalem), and information from Plame and Wilson’s own books. What could have been dry material is kept alive by the film’s intense focus on the couple’s relationship and their opposing character traits. Wilson’s zeal to speak out, as he races round television studios, is contrasted with Plame’s reserve, an instinctive silence born from years in the secret service.
President Bush plays himself, of course, in old newsreel, worrying about the “noo-cue-ler” threat, and real scenes are intercut with reconstructed ones. A particular delight is the slimy, twisted, bullying performance by David Andrews as Scooter Libby, the Vice President’s chief of staff.
Fair Game’s director, Doug Liman, shot the Bourne thrillers, but this film is a trickier sell. The first time I saw it at the Cannes festival, I was so busy following the complex plot that I failed to appreciate the depths of the relationship between Plame and Wilson, and the actors’ convincing portrayal of what happens when two huge careers and egos clash in a family. This week, I happened to see the film on International Women’s Day, and decided Plame and Watts deserve an award for their services to feminism.
Doug Liman, 12A, 108 mins