FAIR GAME (Doug Liman 2010)

[Chris Knipp]

Doug Liman: FAIR GAME (2010)

http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/3108/fairgamedougliman.jpg
Naoimi Watts and Sean Penn in Fair Game

The story of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame

"Fair game": that's how Karl Rove described covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, who was outed (and thus robbed of her career) by instigation of the Bush administration after her husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote a New York Times op-ed article revealing that President Bush's State of the Union address had contained information he knew to be false about Iraqi purchases of uranium to justify the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This film is the story of Wilson, his wife, and the machinations of the Bush administration. It's one of the very few fully successful anti-Iraq war movies, because it's smart, accurate, and not preachy. It's occasionally strident, but the stridency is entirely embedded in the authentic voice of Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn). Just about everything in Fair Game, including Wilson's bluster, is plain fact. The movie actually reveals more than the press accounts, not only about the minute-by-minute story of this scandal and details of Joe Wilson's role, but surprising revelations of Valerie Plame Wilson's dangerous and important work as an undercover CIA operative.

First this is a story about the falsified run-up to Iraq. Next it is an account of how a married couple fought the powers that be (and also each other) in the irrational and belligerent atmosphere of Bush-era Washington. Most significantly it is a revelation of how the executive branch severely punished American citizens for being whistleblowers. (There is clear evidence this is still going on under the new administration.) Fair Game is hardly a fun movie, and despite fine acting, not always a stylish one. The Middle Eastern sequences are standard issue. There is a hectic drive through a Baghdad combat zone that seems tacked on. But by sticking to the facts of a case that's telling and significant, Doug Liman has made a smart and truthful movie that will engage political junkies and still-angry opponents of the Iraq war.

What happened is complicated, yet it's all laid out quite clearly in the first half hour. First come the aluminum tubes bought by Iraq. Bush administration functionaries insist they were going to be used for uranium centrifuges. CIA experts, at meetings Valerie Plame is involved in, debunk this claim. Next there is the matter of yellowcake ("enriched") uranium concentrate used in making nuclear bombs. The CIA sent Wilson to Niger where Iraq was alleged to have purchased large quantities of the yellowcake. Wilson had experience of several African countries and high-level contacts in Niger. He found no evidence that any large quantities of yellowcake uranium had been moved out of Niger.

Meanwhile -- one thing that's new information for most of us -- we see Valerie Plame (superbly played by Naomi Watts) at work in the field. She has dangerous missions tracking down illicit traders in weapons and working with agents. One of her missions is to make sure Iraq does not obtain nuclear weapons. She confronts an Iraqi scientist who's teaching incognito in Cairo. Later she persuades a doctor working in the US, Dr. Zahraa (played by Israeli actress Liraz Charhi), to visit her physicist brother Hammad (Egyptian actor Khaled Nabawy) and ask him fifty questions about the Iraqi nuclear program. He virtually laughs in her face, saying there has been no Iraqi nuclear program since the early Nineties, and that the Americans very well know this. Later, Plame tries to arrange for Hammad and a group of colleagues to escape Iraq as the US attack begins. She argues they're "the real weapons of mass destruction," because they'll simply go and build WMD's for America's enemies elsewhere if not brought to the States.

Scenes of the cigar-smoking Joe Wilson and Valerie socializing with their friends show Joe to be a blowhard spoiling for a fight. Retired from his diplomatic career, with an independent consulting gig that's not a huge success, he's a bit at loose ends. His wife Valerie has an important job that frequently takes her to far-off and dangerous destinations Joe isn't even authorized to know about. Joe winds up caring for their two young kids and learns from post-its that Valerie is off to "Cleveland." (She's really gone to Cairo.) After he's incensed by the Bush-Cheney run-up to Iraq (chronicled by many news clips shown on in-scene TV's), he publishes the Times op-ed piece debunking the State of the Union speech's claims about non-existent nuclear weapons production -- the alleged uranium purchase. A week later an article by the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak July 14, 2003 about Wilson's trip and his increased criticism of the administration's claims to justify the invasion casually mentions that Wilson's wife was a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction."

With this exposure, Plame is quickly eliminated from the agency -- ending a 20-year career there. The film shows how sudden and painful this was and how coldly her superiors rebuffed her efforts to have the rescue of the Iraqi scientists carried out. All her contacts were blown. She struggles to keep things quiet. Her women friends remain friendly. Joe becomes a public figure. He knows revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative is against the law, and he points to Karl Rove. We know, and the film shows, that the person charged with punishing Wilson by exposing his wife was Rove's underling "Scooter" Libby. After decades of secret work, Joe's very public TV appearances and lectures go against the grain for Valerie and their marriage is on the rocks.

From a variety of points of view Joe Wilson's behavior is questionable. He's an ambiguous kind of hero. Maybe most real-life heroes are. Diplomats aren't supposed to "play" the press. The movie's last section includes Penn giving a rousing speech to college students. It shows Valerie and Joe reunited. "You did good," she says. And in spite of everything, he did.

In some of the scenes of Hammad and the other Iraqi scientists, Iraqi Arabic is spoken, a relative rarity in Hollywood movies. The Middle Eastern scenes are, nonetheless, as slapdash and unconvincing as such sequences in other American films, such as the clumsy and inaccurate Rendition. But it seems like Liman and his writers, Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who worked from Joe's Politics of Truth and Valerie's Fair Game, are spot-on in their depiction of the beleaguered couple and their story as at once casualties and heroes of the Iraq war. True to its factual nature, the movie ends with a cameo of the actual Valerie Plame Wilson testifying in 2007 to the House Oversight Committee hearing-- in which she declares that her identity and job were revealed by the administration for "purely political reasons." Thanks to Penn, Watts, and a restrained Doug (Bourne Identity) Liman, this is a good film for what it does not do -- scream and shout or overdramatize. However it gets lost in detail and becomes repetitious toward the end. It is so close to the minutiae of those days and years and those two lives that it never really sings cinematically. Justin Chang of Variety is basically right that Fair Game has "impeccable politics" but "not quite enough solid drama." But the politics matter, and rarely come through with such clarity in an American movie these days.

Fair Game debuted in May at Cannes, where it was the only US film selected for competition. It went into limited release in US theaters November 5, 2010.

[Howard Schumann]

FAIR GAME

Directed by Doug Liman, U.S., 2010, 108 minutes

One of the key ingredients in President George W. Bush’s campaign to convince the American people of the necessity of invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power was the sixteen lines in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union address in which he claimed that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” presumably to build a nuclear bomb. Though the CIA and the State Department told the White House that this was not good intelligence, by repeating this false statement, Bush was able to push through a vote in Congress to authorize the war in Iraq, warning of “mushroom clouds” over American cities.

Directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and based on books written by covert CIA operative Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn), Fair Game is a hard hitting political thriller about events leading up to the Iraq War of 2003 that dramatizes the Bush Administration’s eagerness to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to our national security. Though partly fictionalized, the film points to many real events and uses the actual names of the participants involved with the exception of the invented exiled Iraqi doctor (Liraz Charhi) Valerie recruits and her brother (Khaled Nabawy), a scientist living in Baghdad.

Fair Game survives a confusing opening hour that shows events around the globe from Kuaka Lumpur, to Amman, Jordan, to Cairo, Egypt and Cleveland, Ohio in its effort to establish that Plame, a hardened CIA spy for 18 years, worked in secret on a mission to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Though Plame did work in that capacity, depiction of events that take place abroad in the film’s first hour are imagined since Plame’s real work in the CIA is classified, though Liman claims that credible scenarios were pieced together from interviews with other sources.

Plame hides her secret life by telling friends that she is working as a venture capitalist, and even her husband knows little of her whereabouts and what exactly she is working on. Liman describes the Wilson’s home life including their relationship with their two small children and reminds us how difficult it was for both spouses. According to the script by Jez Butterworth and his brother John-Henry, Plame is soon asked to lead a special Task Force to ascertain the legitimacy of reports that Niger has sold 50 tons of “yellowcake” uranium ore to Saddam Hussein. Consequently, her husband, Joe Wilson, a former US diplomat in both Niger and Iraq and knowledgeable about Niger, was dispatched with Valerie’s approval to Africa to investigate.

Wilson, in reporting back to the CIA on his mission, established to his and the agency’s satisfaction that not only were these reports false, but it would have been impossible for Niger to make such a uranium sale. The White House was informed by the CIA of this fact in March 2002, 10 months before the president’s speech. In a July 6 opinion piece for the New York Times, Wilson wrote: “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” He added that, given the administration’s rejection of his and the CIA’s analysis “because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”

Shortly thereafter, Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA spy was exposed in a column written by Richard Novak, a reporter friendly to the White House. Though the reason behind the exposure is not known with certainty, Wilson claimed that Karl Rove told reporters that outing Plame in the newspaper was “fair game”, and the former diplomat calls his wife’s exposure an act of political reprisal for the piece critical of the White House. Whatever the motive, it was a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and the indictment and sentencing of Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, a sentence commuted by President Bush.

With Valerie's cover blown, she is dismissed by the C.I.A. called a traitor by sycophants in the media, threatened with death by phone calls to her Washington, D.C. home, and rejected by her friends who ask her if she carries a gun and has she ever killed anyone? Plame is reluctant to go public but her husband willingly talks on TV shows to clear their names and bring to light the administration’s chicanery. This public display, however, threatens the stability of their marriage as Wilson attempts to convince his wife to speak out but is met with strong resistance.

The turning point, according to the film, is Valerie’s visit to her parents, especially when her father (Sam Shepard), a retired Air Force officer, convinces her that loyalty to one’s country can work both ways. Labeled as “inspired by real events” and told from the viewpoint of Plame and Wilson with events in the White House taken from actual court transcripts, Fair Game is a timely reminder of the abuse of governmental power and the lives of innocent people that are caught in the crosswinds. Though the film’s second half feels strangely rushed and incomplete, Fair Game is a powerful film that forces us to relive the outrage of those days when government deception was an everyday occurrence.

GRADE: A-

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for your excellent review, and your further discussion of the story.

The film is not perfect, though it's very good. It's one of the best Iraq war movies, and yet, as before, I doubt many will be excited about it. That's too bad, but I can partly see why.

I'm surprised you feel the second half of the flm "feels strangely rushed and incomplete,." What makes you feel that? This film is full of details, and follows facts very closely, despite as you say, some details being fictional, and those of Plame's CIA work not being confirmed. Some details I'm not sure of myself. Reviews have repeated that Plame says she works in venture capital, I thought she said, as she did in real life, that she worked for an energy consulting firm called "Brewster Jennings & Associates." I think what Wilson said was not that it would have been impossible for Niger to have made that uranium sale, but would have been impossible for Niger to have made the sale without its having been very obvious to many people in Niger; whereas nobody knew about such a sale. Of course the story is much more complicated than this, because of Blair and the British's support of the Niger sale claims and use of forged documents to do so, which was later exposed.

This film brings up the issue of how the Bush administration blatantly punished Wilson for being a whistle blower, and the distribution of the film has caused discussion in Washington in which people have said that in the Obama administration, whistle blowers have been even more under fire, that the situation has become even worse. A Truthout article (http://www.truth-out.org/after-valerie-plame-obama-makes-fair-game-todays-whistleblowers64791) says:
As Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project (GAP) told Truthout about the Bush approach compared to now:

"It's the same or worse: the politics of personal destruction, vengefulness, is still there. Obama [i.e., the administration] has indicted four people for leaking, more than the last three administrations [George Bush's and Clinton's terms] combined. 'No Drama' Obama is driven to distraction by leaks, he seethes and is tormented by it." As she pointed out in a blog post recently: "The reality is, Obama - not Bush - has criminalized whistleblowing.

This interesting, troubling, and very detailed piece was written on the occasion of a special showing of the film in DC at which Plame, Wilson, Doug Liman, and others were present to discuss it after the screening, including others under fire and under indictment for whistelblowing activities since that time of 2003 and the Plame-Wilson affair. The film's relevance and importance are indicated by the fact that today, with Bush and Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby gone, somebody who leaks secrets about US war atrocities may be worse off than Daniel Ellsberg was under Nixon.

[Howard Schumann]

Thanks for your kind comments on my review. What I felt at the end was that I wanted to hear more of her actual testimony before Congress and I thought that too much time was devoted to the back story and not enough to the outing. Just a personal reaction and I'm sure there are valid opinions to the contrary. I realize the crackdown on whistle blowers may be continuing but I get turned off by such blatant attacks on Obama. I think that sometimes the national security could be compromised if the practice was allowed to continue, but I agree that there should be more concentration on what was said rather than who said it. Anyway, I agree about the relevance of the film.

[Chris Knipp]

I do think that you wrote a very good and informative review.

As for the back story of Fair Game, concerning Plame and Wilson, it is very interesting, in my view, and essential to the story and making the events have a completely human face; making a good movie. But I would not disagree with you that it feels like something is missing from the movie. To my mind the second half is too repetitious. It may be as is often the case for political films that the filmmakers have too much of a bone to pick, too much of a point to make, to make a really good movie. On the other hand it is a very intelligent movie with a lot of specific and accurate information that is deftly presented.

The point in citing this article and in this material coming up at a showing of the film in Washington is only that severe government reprisals on whistleblowers are not an exclusive speciality of the Bush administration. The article is perhaps at fault in focusing on dramatically pointing to Obama, but giving the new administration a free ride simply because it is democratic seems to me a total abdication of our responsibility as citizens to be aware of what is going on, of how our rights are being continually abrogated under whatever administration. Agreed, it is wrong for progressives and others to suggest that Obama is responsible for everything that is going wrong, but if you are not a part of the solution you are part of the problem.

[Howard Schumann]

Very well said. I agree with everything you said. This might be a first.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm very glad to hear it.