Valerie Plame Wilson is Fair Game

Bette and I saw Fair Game last night. I’ve already admitted I don’t have a discriminating taste in movies and if you do, you ought to remember that when you are reading this reflection on it. I thought it was really good. This is the story of the Bush Administration’s outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, a CIA undercover operative and wife of Joe Wilson, a diplomat. Here's Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson.

I liked it in part because I remember all this. I read Joe Wilson’s piece in the New York Times in which he said his findings in Niger had been misrepresented. I remember the search for the administration tool who slipped Plame’s CIA status to Robert Novak, the columnist. I remember the controversy about “the sixteen words” in Bush’s address to Congress.[1]

In the movie, there is no ambiguity at all about the decision to out Plame. They need a new story. Wilson asks in a speech near the end of the movie, “How did the question change from whether there are WMD to who is Valerie Plame? How did it change from who put in the sixteen words’ to whether Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by his CIA wife?”[2] As the media master says in Wag the Dog, “Change the story, change the lead.”

I liked it because of very strong performances by Naomi Watts as Plame and by Sean Penn as her husband, Joe Wilson. We see her in the field in some very dicey situations. Very competent, very cool. We see her confronted by the publishing of her CIA identity. Incredulous and angry at the politics; hurt and disappointed by the response of the friends she had before they knew she was CIA. We see her practical and strategic with her mercurial husband; then, persuaded, contrite and supportive. She covers quite a range of action and passion and I thought she was very good.

The movie reminded me a lot of Matt Damon’s Green Zone, where he discovers first that there are no WMD at the places he is told to look, then why he is being asked to look where there are no WMD, then why President Bush really wants this war and what he will do to get it. In Fair Game, we see the domestic policy side of the same shell game.

Finally, I think the approach of the movie that moved me most was how the Wilsons’ lives just kept on during all this. A convention of moviemaking is that you introduce a character as an employee of some kind or other and after the introduction, you never see him at work because the movie can’t spare the time. Wilson and his wife go right on caring for their children. Bedtime stories are interrupted by the most brutal news from the CIA world. They have to choose between meeting a crucially important political ally and making sure the kids have breakfast. One afternoon they have the most important fight of their marriage at a playground. As important as it is, it is broken up by “he’s got my truck” squabbles between the kids..

Really important people in the middle of a major crisis, still taking their kids out to the playground and trying to come to grips with their separate approaches to the crisis. It is so realistic it hurts a little.

[1] “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”
[2] There is an ongoing gag about how to pronounce Niger. Wilson says, correctly, Nuh=zhare”” The tools, the dupes, and the bad guys all mispronounce it. It is a funny spot in a movie that needs a funny spot.