The Not So Glamorous Life of a Modern Spy

Naomi Watts' new film Fair Game about the story of Valerie Plame shows a world where news headlines and sound bytes are a matter of life and death.

"How can you look someone in the face and lie to them?" asks an understandably troubled and scared female Iraqi doctor, who is about to be recruited to help on a very dangerous CIA mission to her home country.  Valerie Plame's response is that one has to know what the truth is that one is lying for, and never forget it.

So goes director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and British screenwriter brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth's new movie Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn as CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.  The film looks at the blowback leading up to and from Plame's notorious 2003 outing, after Wilson wrote a New York Times editorial specifically disclaiming that he had "found" evidence of yellowcake uranium sales to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  (He, of course, believed and told the government exactly the opposite.)  But for those who expect high-level courtroom theatrics and operatic power plays within the Bush White House, this movie takes an entirely different turn.  While there are actors who play Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, there are no actor-played roles assigned for the late Robert Novak, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, or even uber-prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, as this very personal, intimate film emphasizes the story of the Wilsons' marriage and family life, and what this shocking, unprepared-for twist did to them.  And also, what it may have done to Plame's helpless contacts and sources left behind in the war zones.

In most spy movies, women characters come in one of three flavors:  the Natasha Fatale or Mata Hari vixen; the fearless, liberated dominatrix like Emma Peel or Pussy Galore; or the steely, gimlet-eyed power suit, like James Bond's "M" or Laura Linney in Breach. TV has opened up the stereotypes somewhat, with shows like In Plain Sight and Covert Affairs, but while those shows occasionally have a devastating, challenging story or script, most of their thorny suspense issues are neatly resolved within one hour.

Not so with Fair Game -- the issues in this movie still haven't been fully resolved seven years later, and they probably won't be anytime soon.  And these spies next door are also the parents of young children, complete with the little minor crises of temper tantrums, dirty clothes, play dates and pickup times from school, in discordant counterpoint with the serious-as-brain-surgery careers both working parents keep in this harriedly successful, professional family.  Indeed, to someone raised on The Bourne Identity or Mission Impossible movies, Fair Game's many domestic scenes seem almost from another entirely different film, as though Penn and Watts wandered into an old rerun of Family or Knots Landing, or a bourgeois suburban-angst indie like Revolutionary Road or We Don't Live Here Anymore.

And that's exactly the point.  Liman weaves these scenes effortlessly into the major narrative (I'm using that word very intentionally, as you'll soon see), to illustrate how these people would seem at first glance to be just like any other dream yuppie couple successfully balancing children and career.  And the very normality and ordinariness of this life, and the automatic vulnerability of having children, also add an extra passive sense of dread to the proceedings.

Yet this isn't to say that the Wilsons come across as just reg'lar folks by any means.  They drive luxury and upscale cars, they live in a two-story brownstone with a pool and large backyard that's probably worth seven figures, they have wine and gourmet dinner parties with other well-off professionals.  And they are clearly on a first-name basis with power people even outside of Valerie's secret life, what with Wilson's career in government and his setting-up of a VIP consulting business in economic and foreign policy affairs.  But even though this "power couple" indeed has more subterranean power and access to it than most of us could conceive of in our day-to-day worlds, when REAL power, in the form of an unctuous Scooter Libby, sets up shop literally within Company headquarters, and begins mercilessly grilling agents on whether they were absolutely, positively 100% certain Iraq had no access to weapons of mass destruction, even former Ambassador Wilson and his CIA agent wife meet their match.  (The film goes out of its way to illustrate that far from being a left-wing apologist for Saddam, Wilson had been physically threatened by Saddam during the run-up to the first Gulf War and truly hated him and his government.)

Naomi Watts delivers an Oscar-consideration performance, walking the tightrope between tough-as-nails covert spook and intelligence analyst, and warm wife, best-girlfriend, and soccer mom, while Sean Penn brings his usual intensity and freight-train unstoppability to Wilson, who feels (whether due to ego or duty or both) backed into a corner -- a person for whom if there's a choice between "fight" or "flight", you don't need me to tell you which one is his default mode.

The film's most controversy-baiting aspect is its strong implication that perhaps several, mostly innocent people may have died, either at the direct hand of the CIA, or due to a not-so-benign neglect, as a result of the Plame outing.  (Purportedly, the story illustrated in the film, which is based on Plame and Wilson's separate, twin autobiographies, is a composite of real-life situations and characters that obviously are largely classified.)  Whether factually exact or not, though, these scenes illustrate Fair Game's real point -- that Washington has become a world where there is no factual exactness except to illustrate larger themes.  A world people where live and die by newspaper headlines and sound bytes, where political "narrative" is quite literally a matter of life and death.  Aside from Watts and Penn, the most notable "character" in the movie is the insular and often unreal Washington press machine, with liberal use of clips from MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, and drooling close-ups of pages from The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Even if one believes today (or from the very beginning) that the war in Iraq as conducted was completely unjustifiable, our worst travesty and blunder since Vietnam, there were certainly reasons to fear a never-ending Saddam rule of Iraq.  Especially with his certifiably insane sons, Uday and Qusay, waiting in the wings to take over (a la Kim Jong-Il from the late Kim Il-Sung), should Daddy Dearest eventually die or retire from illness.  (Regime change was a stated Clinton administration policy goal, years before 9/11.)   For a much more sinister motive, who better to turn to than Oliver Stone, whose satirical 2008 "bio-pic" of George W. Bush, W, has Dick Cheney (played with relish by Richard Dreyfuss) standing in front of enough blinking PowerPoint maps and graphics to pass for the set of Entertainment Tonight in the Map Room.  He says that taking over Iraq is an absolute necessity with or without WMDs, so as to have a centralized base from which to conduct the rest of the War on Terror, not to mention the U.S. and North America's vastly disproportionate energy and oil usage.  (In that film, when Condi and Colin Powell ask what Cheney's "exit strategy" is, Cheney snarls, "There is no exit strategy -- we STAY!")

But these motivations, valid or not, were nowhere near strong enough to convince a skeptical UN, let alone the parents of American soldiers or non red-meat-machine congressmen and senators, that a total war effort and invasion would be justified.  And Libby, Rove, Cheney, et al, knew it.  So, a new "narrative" had to be constructed that would justify the war and invasion -- whatever the cost.  After Wilson's article is published, Libby and Rove's first concern is damage control in the media and on the D.C. cocktail circuit.  They need to "change the subject" from whether or not the administration was telling the absolute truth about the run-up to the war, to a game of I've Got a Secret with the Plame/Wilson marriage.

"The truth is out there."  "You can't handle the truth."  (I personally remember watching a quite un-ironic Vice President Cheney on Charlie Rose say, about a year or two after the Plame outing, that one of if not THE biggest problem facing America was its "inability to keep secrets.")  In a world where one can find almost any "truthiness" they want to believe backed up on the Internet, where people write fake memoirs and make faux documentaries and are rewarded lavishly for doing so, what is the very nature of truth as we process it today?  Can we really "make our own reality" (as Karl Rove was purported to have said to a New York Times reporter), without regard for the facts of life in this moment?   On the other hand, does the tea partier with a bumper sticker that reads, "The Bible Said It -- I Believe It -- That Settles It!", or the aggressively dogmatic atheist, demonstrate any better allegiance to real fact-based thinking?

Fair Game never really answers those questions, nor can it really, but it certainly makes one think about them.  It takes an unblinking look at what happens when wishful thinking becomes a substitute for reality, and a world where facts are things to be arranged and rearranged, like Billie Holliday or Judy Garland tackling song lyrics, merely to prop up what other people (especially powerful people) already want to believe.