If casting is half the battle, then Fair Game director Doug Liman was already three-quarters of the way home when he signed Naomi Watts to play former CIA agent Valerie Plame and Sean Penn her blustering diplomat husband. As Plame and Joe Wilson, Watts and Penn get to sink their chops into one of the most cinema-friendly true stories in recent history; if a guy in a bathrobe writing world-beating code could be conjured into a blissfully entertaining movie, what might be done with the story of a spy, who did spy stuff in war time, until her righteous husband blew a couple of inconvenient whistles and her own government ruined her life? Featuring George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice as themselves? Refresh that, Sorkin!
In fact it was the incorrigibly verbal Social Network writer whose spirit I kept hoping might turn up to bless Fair Game, or at least add some snap and crackle to what is more of a simmer-until-done inquiry into dirty Bush II-era politics and domestic conflict resolution than a Bourne-style action potboiler. Based on both Plame and Wilson's respective memoirs, the script, written by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, begins with a confident balance of character, background and story: In the opening sequence, dateline fall of 2001, Plame expertly flips a potential informant in Kuala Lumpur; in the next scene she suffers her husband's inability to keep a dinner party from turning into a moral re-education camp. "Well, Jeff..." Wilson begins, after a freaked-out friend (Tom McCarthy) admits that he couldn't see a demonstrably Muslim passenger on a plane without losing his marbles. Liman cuts to Plame mildly chastising her husband on the ride home; Wilson retorts (he's not big on simply responding) with a crinkle that she knew he was "like this" when they got married.
A few of those extra-cinematic winks help Fair Game hit the ground running: Physically Watts is of course a decent match for the even more aggressively glamorous Plame; in spirit, it would seem, they are even closer. In the field Plame was first and foremost an actress, a pretender whose belief in her pretending was often of mortal consequence. Even at home she is unknown, lying to her husband about where she's going and where she's been as a matter of protocol, and rifling through personas like a performer in a six-person Shakespeare troupe. Penn brings a tidy chunk of his concerned-citizen image to his portrayal of an irrepressible, egotistical former diplomat. Their marriage is defined by distance, the dance of raising small children, a smidge of professional jealousy, and the melancholy gift of interlocking temperaments: His insecurity manifests in public outbursts, hers in a tendency to disappear, whether it be to a destination on the other side of the world or somewhere inside herself.
Too often Liman tries to turn exposition (and it occasionally feels like the story is suspended for a data dump) into small-scale action, so that a scene in which Plame's unit debates whether aluminum tubes reportedly found in Iraq are consistent with those used to build nuclear weapons is marred by over-caffeinated, army-crawling camerawork (Liman also acted as DP). By contrast, a beautiful suite of scenes depicting Scooter Libby's (David Andrews) interrogation of various CIA agents on the same subject captures the diabolical calibration of pressure -- precise and insinuating -- required to hot-wire the war machine into ignition. He just keeps asking the question -- "What can you tell me about aluminum tubes?" -- until he gets the answer he wants.
That answer, as followers of the story and The New York Times op-ed section know well, was contradicted loudly by Joe Wilson in the summer of 2003, four months into the war. The previous year Wilson was sent, on the recommendation of his wife, to look into a rumor that Niger (where he was the U.S. ambassador under Bush I) was selling yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Liman condenses the trip into a hazy, busy montage sequence, and though the style is a little convoluted, the outcome is clear: No nukes. Plame's parallel operation to gather intel by using Iraqi-Americans with ties to Iraqi physicists as information mules also rolls up a big fat donut. "You have to know why you're lying," she advises one skeptical recruit, solemn and breathless as a Broadway diva on opening night, "and never forget the truth."
When Plame's identity is casually unveiled in a column written by Robert Novak (whose involvement, along with the scandal's Girl Friday, Judith Miller, doesn't figure into the film) several days after Wilson's public reiteration of his findings in Niger, the spy's career is over, and her marriage hits the ropes as well. Having not considered the consequences -- or advised his wife about his plans -- Wilson dove headlong into wrestling the story into submission, one man against the Republican smear machine.
When the story broke it was telegraphed to most -- including Plame herself -- through television pundits, sound bites and spin jockeys; a cacophonous, seemingly uncontrollable narrative took shape. Liman arranges a host of television clips from the time within his frame, giving each one a chattering line or two, conscious of the visual and narrative authority -- vested by virtue of its size alone -- that his chosen medium has over that of the bad guys. Bush, Cheney and Condi pop up on various monitors, along with other talking heads, but they look so small on those little glowing screens, like tricksters hovering in thin air.
Plame herself seems to fade from view in the aftermath of the leak, despite the fact that Liman narrows his focus, as the world did, on to the couple of the hour. Watts is excellent as a woman committed to her country but perhaps even more so to the demands of her job. She's inscrutable by professional design and avoidant by nature, and her layers prove resistant to the turn the film takes into marital crisis and reconciliation. Some private happiness is salvaged, and feel-good footage of the real-life Plame's testimony before congress accompanies the credits, and yet it's the darndest thing: With a film as politically provocative and open to narrative risk as Fair Game is, an upbeat ending feels a little like getting the slip.