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Fair Game: real-life spy drama by Bourne director
Film of the Week: A reminder that before Bradley Manning, the Bush administration exposed a US spy
Doug Liman, the director behind fictional spy thrillers Mr and Mrs Smith and The Bourne Identity, has made a film about a true-life CIA agent and her ex-diplomat husband who were targeted by George W Bush's administration.
In the era of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, Valerie Plame's unmasking may seem unremarkable but the repercussions of her story remain disturbingly real.
Liman's Fair Game, which opens in UK cinemas this Friday, stars Naomi Watts as the covert operative whose identity was leaked in July 2003 to a US national newspaper column. The White House hoped to discredit her husband Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn), a former US ambassador who publicly claimed that the Bush administration had lied about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.
Because of this, Plame was considered 'fair game'. However her blown cover not only ended her CIA career but also jeopardised the lives of many of her contacts in the Middle East.
In many ways Fair Game is a portrait of a modern marriage as the couple juggle the demands of work and domesticity: Plame runs CIA missions overseas while her husband looks after their young twins. Their relationship threatens to implode when they find themselves thrust into the public spotlight and accused of treachery by the media.
Fair Game is compellingly directed and convincingly acted - with the Los Angeles Times calling Watts's performance "one of the finest of her career". The film deftly dovetails the political and the personal: the disturbing fact that the public was misled over WMDs and the toll taken on the couple's relationship.
But no matter how devastating this turn of events was for Plame and her husband, it is ultimately overshadowed by the far more disquieting - and ongoing - story of how America justified going to war with Iraq.
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:Kirk Honeycutt, the Hollywood Reporter: "Fair Game might be one of the best spy movies ever, even if it contains little skullduggery. Like a John le Carre novel, its story shows how things really work and how compromised lives can become when one must serve more than one master."
Justin Chang, Variety: "Watts has no trouble conveying Valerie's supreme competence, something the agent's peers are often quick to underestimate based on her looks, but the material doesn't allow her to convey the full magnitude of her character's devastation at what she's lost. Penn... is almost cast too much in line with his off-screen persona... one senses [that it is] not Wilson but Penn wagging his finger at the audience."
Matt Mueller, Total Film: "Liman, for his part, follows the blockbusting of The Bourne Identity and Mr & Mrs Smith with an unexpected twist on the spy game: a uniquely affecting human drama." (4/5 stars) ·
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Apologies Yellowcake Uranium - not Centrifuges... not concentrating when typing.
Hey ho - going to go all Devil's Advocate on this. Plame and this film are part of the ongoing airbrushing and miscasting of what was going on back in 2003. It is highly selective to claim "The White House hoped to discredit her husband Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn), a former US ambassador who publicly claimed that the Bush administration had lied about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq". The actual point here is that Wilson had come out and stated that he had absolute belief that there was no attempt top provide centrifuges out of Africa (the 'nigerian' connection' that was always exceptionally difficult to either corroborate or deny). The White House was in a bind in that Wilson seemed impeccable however they knew that the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate from the Director of National Intelligence) actually stated exactly the opposite - that there *was* evidence. So Scooter Libby indicates to Novak at the Washington Post that *Ambassador* Wilson (with no track history in either intelligence, or for that matter Nuclear Research) was able to state that because his wife was Valerie Plame who was an *ex* covert agent who had specialised on investigating such things. Plame was indicated as 'fair game' because she was no longer covert and actually had a desk job at Langley. The point Libby wanted to get across was that nevertheless the NIE stated the opposite. So Scooter Libby broke the law by providing a classified document to Novak. It is worth asking "what the f*** was Wilson doing briefing about something that he had no authority to brief on anyway?". The only reason he could be adjudged to have any authority was on the basis of who his wife was? Libby's briefing about Plame was not about some innocent who had been caught up by a web of deceit: it was about someone who was actively connected to an ongoing effort to discredit any attempt to get a resolution through the UN (which frankly would have made the last 7 years a hell of a lot easier, and was only attempted because the French essentially backtracked on their commitment to the terms of the original resolution). I underline: the NIE assumed that there were supplies going to S Hussein from Africa suggesting that he was going to be able to build a nuke. Wilson was claiming otherwise. The only reason he was able to was because Plame was his wife who correctly assessed the risk as low. But that was not what had been submitted by Langley, and was contrary to the Intelligence. If Scooter was breaking the law for providing classified documents to Novak, Plame and Wilson were also certainly doing so as well. At the end of the day 2003 was a crappy time with both sides convinced of their own rectitude and honesty and appalled by the double dealing etc of the other. What I find most galling about the whole retrospective analysis is that it is so appalling blinkered.
More rubbish out of Hollywood. Like the rest of the rubbish from there I won't be watching it.