REVIEW: Fair Game

DARK SECRETS

It’s a sign of a flourishing democracy and a free press, that so many films have been made in Hollywood, openly criticizing the Bush administration’s war on Iraq, to hunt for the weapons of mass destructions that did not exist.

Doug Liman’s Fair Game, is based on the real life story of CIA operative Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts), whose cover is blown and her career wrecked when her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) writes an article exposing the WMD hoax. He has gone to Niger to seek evidence of the report that the African nation had sold uranium to Iraq for nuclear weapons, and found none.

In retaliation, someone high up in the ‘system’ leaked the information to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent (which not even her best friends knew), which endangered not just her, but her family and her sources in several countries (Mumbai is also mentioned). Her work is discredited too, as it is alleged that she was only a low-level functionary.

When this happens, Valerie’s promise of getting out the families of nuclear scientists from Iraq is ignored and her contacts in Baghdad killed. The film is so openly critical of the government, the CIA and a part of the media—the other part of course, helps Plame and Wilson get across their side of the story—that one can only admire the filmmaker’s courage in making it, with real names intact.

In the end, footage of the real Valerie Plame making a statement before a committee is shown, and it’s amazing how much Naomi Watts resembles her. But Watts downplays her glamour to play Plame as woman who goes on hazardous missions all over the world, and is an ordinary wife and mother at home.

The tone of the film is not thriller-ish but more like a factual recreation—the two lead characters are not as devil-may-care as the fictional Mr and Mrs Smith, but an ordinary couple who do their work honestly and are outraged at the betrayal by the people they serve loyally. Plame asks one of her colleagues how he can sleep after what has been done to her, and he shrugs nonchalantly, saying that he sleeps quite well. It is when the fate of the world is—directly or indirectly—in the hands of such people (so many of the men in power look and dress alike), that it is constantly on the verge of disaster. This one’s worth a look.