ONE CELEBRATES the green energy scheme ex–President Bush unveiled this week: a bold new plan to insulate America’s thrift shops with biodegradable mulch. I read in HuffPo that Joseph C. Wilson has found that Bush characterizes the Plame Affair as “a massive distraction.” The movie based on the story, Fair Game, is, by contrast, a massive diversion.
On the whole, Fair Game, Doug Liman’s account of the felonious Plame business, is a model of exciting, intelligent espionage lore. It’s shot with braced but fluid camerawork. Naomi Watts’ performance as Valerie Plame is one of the year’s best. It’s a le Carréan display of how a secret agent gets leverage in places as different as Kuala Lumpur and Cleveland.
In the period between the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion, members of the CIA ask the independent consultant Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn) to go to Niger to confirm confidential reports of uranium being sent to Saddam Hussein. As former ambassador to Gabon, Wilson knows the African terrain, and he quickly discovers there was no such shipment. This news outrages those in the Bush administration who are trying to gin up the case for war in Iraq. In a Nixonian attempt to silence a whistleblower, high administration figures leak the name of Wilson’s wife, Victoria Plame, to columnist Robert Novak, a move that destroys her career and puts her operations in jeopardy. Liman sensibly takes us out of the Beltway to follow the story of one of these ops: the turning out and sending abroad of an Iraqi émigré doctor (Liraz Charhi).
It’s hard for a film to be all things to all people. Fair Game’s script is less surefooted with the domestic drama than it is with the paranoid/political tale-telling. Penn gets to play a different kind of character: decidedly upper-class, peremptory and with little patience for fools. He gives one of his strongest and slyest performances, but (as always) he becomes mannered: as in a late-night confrontation scene with his wife. And we can predict that the sight of a Washington monument or two will stiffen the besieged couple’s spines. Sam Shepard is one of the monuments, playing Plame’s father, a retired Air Force colonel.Flaws aside, Fair Game celebrates first-rate supporting acting. David Andrews’ Scooter Libby is a cameo portrait of wrong-headed righteousness. Brooke Smith has an almost hideo-comic scene as Valerie’s confidante, who can’t believe she isn’t being told about her friend’s career. (This preternaturally gentle-looking actress gulps, “Did you kill somebody?”). And the fleshy, corrupt Bruce McGill and the always Karloffian Ty Burrell put the spookiness into playing spooks.
Fair Game
PG-13; 108 min.
