Doug Liman (2010)
In 2003 the former diplomat Joseph C Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times claiming that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about WMD to justify the invasion of Iraq. As part of the administration’s attempts to discredit Wilson, White House officials exposed his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative: she’d worked for some years in the Agency as an undercover agent. The screenplay for Doug Liman’s film, by Jez Butterworth and John Butterworth, is based on Plame’s memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. (According to the script, ‘fair game’ was how Plame was described at the time by Karl Rove.) I wish I could have followed the plot better but am pretty sure the fault was in me rather than Liman’s storytelling. Fair Game is a well-paced and entertaining political thriller. What’s more surprising and to the credit of all concerned – Liman and the Butterworths, the actors playing the Wilsons (Naomi Watts and Sean Penn) and their real-life counterparts – is that it’s also a penetrating description of the couple’s marriage. I’m assuming both that the Wilsons are viewed by many liberals as free-speaking heroes and that they had some input to the film. Yet Liman’s presentation of them, while it’s sympathetic, isn’t at all reverential. Perhaps the strongest element of Fair Game is the way in which it suggests that what happened to the Wilsons in 2003 reinforced and exposed the existing imbalances of their relationship. (They’ve stayed together, though: the closing legends explain that Joe and Valerie left Washington DC and now live with their two children in New Mexico.)
At the start of the film, Joe’s international business development outfit isn’t thriving. He’s something of a house husband until his 2002 trip to Niger on behalf of the CIA to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein was trying to get hold of yellowcake uranium. The assignment gives him a new lease of life. One of the startling things about Fair Game is the sense you get that the public controversy in which he and Valerie are embroiled the following year is also invigorating for Joe – a way of restoring the balance of power between him and his much younger wife. When the Wilsons go out for a drink with friends or host a dinner party, Joe’s certainty that he knows best about all things political combines with Valerie’s required silence about her work to make him feel furiously constrained. The evening climaxes in an outburst of scathing invective from Joe before he goes quiet again. Valerie, although appalled and angry at his rudeness, remains politely under cover. They are both, to their fingertips, politically motivated and opinionated animals. We don’t see Valerie spending time with their children or doing anything much at home until she’s suspended from the CIA when the storm breaks. It appears that, once her career has imploded, part of Joe feels that domestic order and hierarchy have been restored.
Liman and the Butterworths seem keen to show in Joe Wilson (and, to a lesser extent, Valerie Plame) how easily a strong moral sense and convinced rightness of purpose can turn arrogant and foolish. So is Sean Penn the right man to cast as Joe? The answer turns out to be yes, not least because Penn draws on his own personality – or what we believe to be his personality, according to his public reputation. The best line in his Oscar acceptance speech for Milk was ‘I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me – often’. The humorous self-awareness of that remark informs his portrait of Joe Wilson. When Joe is sounding off – enjoying the sound of his own voice and the applause of student audiences, making himself insufferable because he knows he’s right – you feel that Penn isn’t just playing the role empathetically but acknowledging these qualities in himself. In one particularly well-written sequence, Joe starts shouting at Valerie then asks her, ‘So if I shout louder than you I win the argument?’ You think he’s saying sorry as best he can until he goes on to say – yell – ‘So if the White House shouts louder than us, does that make them right and us wrong?’ Sean Penn handles this proximity between self-criticism and self-justification in Joe Wilson superbly. The bad hair and the paunchiness are over-emphasised and I wondered as I was watching it if Penn failed in the climactic scene, in which a tearful Joe really does repent to his wife. You can see Penn constructing the signs of remorse. But perhaps this is the culminating success of his characterisation – perhaps it’s Joe who’s straining for contrition (and Penn who knows this is what he might do in a similar situation).
Naomi Watts partnered Penn very successfully in 21 Grams (she also co-starred with him in The Assassination of Richard Nixon) and she’s extraordinarily good as Valerie Plame. In the early scenes of Valerie at work, she has a self-confidence and satisfaction in what she’s doing. Watts conveys with great skill the different registers of these qualities – Valerie is the same woman but a different performer according to whether she’s on an assignment, pretending to be someone other than a CIA operative, or in policy discussions back at the Agency in Washington. When things fall apart, Valerie’s loss of professionally prideful bloom is very striking: she’s physically shocked and diminished by what’s happening. In that last scene with Joe, when he apologises for what he’s done and she tells him the White House men aren’t going to destroy her marriage as well as her career, Watts luminously shows Valerie coming back to determined life. The acting all round is excellent. Valerie’s CIA bosses (Noah Emmerich and Michael Kelly) switch from sympathy with her to minding their own backs: the switch occurs decisively but these scenes aren’t written or played in an obvious way. If David Andrews (as Scooter Libby) and Kristoffer Winters (a hawkish CIA man) overdo things slightly, you still feel they’ve done well to resist the temptation of making their characters all-out villains. Sam Shepard, who has just one scene as Valerie’s father (a retired US army man), is marvellous. Shepard shows us, with powerful economy, how the father loves and respects his daughter, and where she got her toughness from. The contrast between Sam Plame’s still imposing physique and the notes of old age creeping into his voice momentarily gives Fair Game a different, deeper texture.
14 March 2011
