Fair Game

In Kuala Lumpur, a sleazy chauvinist named Hafiz (Anand Tiwari) thinks that he’s meeting someone for a business negotiation. Instead, he’s getting a shakedown by CIA covert operations agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) for his father’s involvement in an arms deal with Pakistan. In February of 2002, her husband, former U.S. Foreign Services Diplomat and National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), was tapped to support George W. Bush’s administration’s presupposition of Iraq’s intention to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger. He later blew the doors open on the controversy surrounding Weapons of Mass Destruction with an op-ed piece titled “What I Didn’t Find In Africa,” published in the New York Times on July 6, 2003. At the time of that publication, 200 American soldiers’ lives had already been lost. Thousands more were to come.

Written by Jez Butterworth and produced, directed and filmed by Doug Liman, this film dramatizes the turmoil in Ms. Plame and Ambassador Wilson’s public and private lives. The story has been widely publicized enough, but the particulars are such: Lewis “Scooter” Libby, played in the film by David Andrews, determines that leaking Plame to the public would hold Wilson at bay. The go-ahead, it has been insinuated, came from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. Many signs and signals point in that direction, but to date no smoking gun has been found. Libby, it seems, was poised to be the fall guy.

Embellished though the story may be, it raises questions from the obverse side of Ms. Plame’s outing. Immediately after Bob Novak leaked her name, Plame’s friends, family and neighbors all know about it. She and Wilson are accused of being communists. Death threats are made against them. Whether or not a seasoned CIA agent and a U.S. Diplomat could be shaken to their wits’ end, their marriage placed in jeopardy, is debatable. However, it’s quite interesting to see the contrast between the dinner conversations before and after the scandal—Wilson mostly brimming to tell his colleagues just how little a clue they have about Iraq, having been himself the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein.

There aren’t any particularly startling insights offered by the film, though it doesnt seem to be aiming for any. Interesting points are made along the way, though. Early in the film, when officials from Vice President Cheney’s office materialize at Plame’s office to squeeze a decidedly biased (read: false) interpretation of gathered intelligence, Plame discounts the idea that shipments of aluminum tubes being tracked by the CIA were to be used in uranium enrichment, “The only similarity was… that they were both made of aluminum.” Later, Wilson notes that the preparation and shipment of 500 tons of uranium yellowcake supposedly destined for Iraq would not go unnoticed. This would translate, he argues, to an abrupt forty-percent increase in Niger’s output of the substance. These facts, of course, are irrelevant to the higher-ups.

An interesting subtext to the film is its implied statement about intelligence gathering methods. One of the chief criticisms of the CIA in recent years has been its increasing reliance upon technology and decreasing presence of knowledgeable field agents who can infiltrate various organizations and countries to accurately determine the credibility of threats. The national dialogue over torture is well-known and well-exhausted, but here the film doesn’t ram it down your throat. (That would confound the whole point, wouldn’t it?) The implication is simply that Plame’s persuasive methods are far more effective at building trust through mutual exchange in order to secure credible information. Torture, by contrast, is effective at getting a subject to tell you whatever you want to hear—whether true or not.

Fair Game • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 108 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language. • Distributed by Summit Entertainment

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