Fair Game
Cinema Nova, 05/12/2010
Status: Behind by 5 films
Everything I know about Valerie Plame comes from a jaunty 3 minute Decemberists song entitled, usefully, “Valerie Plame”. That’s even after sitting through DOUG LIMAN’s Fair Game.
Valerie Plame (NAOMI WATTS, Mother and Child, 21 grams) is a CIA field operative in the weapons non-proliferation taskforce. She trundles around the country and the world trying to figure out who is buying what from whom in order to make nuclear weapons. The Bush government is getting nervous about Iraq, so Valerie investigates a possible sale of yellowcake from Niger and the possible re-instatement of the long dismantled Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Her husband Joe (SEAN PENN, Milk, Mystic River) was once ambassador to Niger and is also sent in to asses the sitch. Valerie, Joe and a bunch of other very smart folk all agree - Iraq doesn’t have a weapons program, Niger didn’t sell any yellowcake. The government goes to war anyway which pisses Joe off, which pisses off the government, and they take it out Valerie, outing her as a CIA agent.
Up ‘til this point in the film I was engaged by the workaday/procedural/spy thriller tone that Liman set up but now, when the poop hits the air con for Valerie, the film is squarely focused on the kitchen sink drama of the Plame-Wilson marriage crumpling under impact. Lots of promising things in a complex story such as this – like the responsibilities of governments and the media – remain completely, disappointingly untouched.
For an incredibly competent and decorated CIA agent, Plame comes across very much in the shadow of men - her husband, her male coworkers and bosses and her father. Which essentially means that I didn’t learn anything about her that I didn’t already know from a pop song.
