Fair Game – review

The progressive statesman Senator Hiram Johnson famously remarked on America's entry into the first world war: "The first casualty when war comes is truth." Three hundred years earlier English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton provided a celebrated punning definition of an ambassador: "An honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." Johnson was in his 79th year when he died on the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a historical event from which we can trace six decades of international conflict, hot and cold, and lying on an unprecedented scale. Fair Game tells the true story of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, an American husband and wife professionally involved in this process, and the disastrous consequences that followed the decision of Joe, a former ambassador, to tell the truth in what he considered his country's interests.

Directed by Doug Liman, the movie-maker responsible for the first film in the Bourne trilogy, Fair Game is adroitly adapted by British playwright Jez Butterworth and his younger brother, John-Henry, from memoirs written by the Johnsons, and it is a riveting conspiracy thriller in the class of All the President's Men, which in many ways it resembles. The setting, too, is Washington, the time between the destruction of the World Trade Centre in 2001 and the early months of the Iraq invasion, and the White House is being run by as devious a collection of scoundrels as those installed there during the Watergate scandal 30 years earlier. The movie begins with the 40-year-old Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), an attractive, power-dressed blonde up to her neck in deception on a mission in Kuala Lumpur. She's posing highly convincingly as a Canadian businesswoman working for a venture capitalism company based in Georgetown, New York. In fact she's an extremely experienced covert agent with the CIA, heading a counter-proliferation unit and ruthlessly targeting an Asian arms dealer attempting to buy nuclear weapons.

It's a brilliant opening, and is followed by showing her at work at the CIA headquarters and at home with husband, Joe (Sean Penn), a retired diplomat, and their three-year-old twins. The notion of an espionage agent secretly enjoying an unassuming suburban life is a familiar movie plot, and this gives a special piquancy to the scenes in which she socialises with smart Washington friends who talk knowingly about politics, unaware of her insider knowledge.

The Wilsons, however, make a crucial professional mistake, and Watts and Penn work beautifully together at showing how this leads to their transformation from secure private citizens dedicated to the public good into insecure, widely vilified public figures. Valerie is asked if Joe is qualified to undertake a CIA mission to check out if there's any truth in the story that Saddam Hussein is attempting to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger for his WMD programme. The job is undertaken in good faith as serving the national interest but clearly constitutes a prima facie case for the charge of conflict of interests, and trouble looms when he reports there is no evidence of such a purchase. This is not what the White House wants to hear. Meanwhile Valerie manipulates some Iraqi scientists and their relatives while gathering evidence in the national interest and makes promises of safe conduct she may find difficult to honour. "You have to know when you're lying and remember what is the truth," she tells one of her anxious clients when explaining how she functions in this twilight world.

Aware that he sefems to be living in a world of spy fiction, Joe light-heartedly remarks: "I'm not feeling very 007-ish." He has, however, got the wrong text in mind. He's actually figuring in a realistic John le Carré scenario, not a Bond fantasy. When the White House cites the yellowcake deal as evidence of Saddam's WMD programme, Joe, as aggressive and forthright as Valerie is discreet and controlled, ignores a friend's advice to "be smart". Instead he writes an article for the New York Times called "What I didn't find in Africa", and the White House strikes back. They leak a story to rightwing columnist Robert Novak that Valerie is a CIA operative, then follow this up with denigratory rumours that she's a minor figure in the organisation and generally distrusted. Though only the slippery "Scooter", after "Scooter" Libby, assistant to the vice-president, is actually charged (and after getting a light sentence, which is then commuted by President Bush), the film makes it clear that this decision to blow Valerie's cover was taken at a high level. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney, was involved, and the wily Karl Rove is the man who described Valerie Plame as "fair game".

The effect is, as intended, to divert attention from the consideration of the central issues of why the invasion took place. The personal consequence for Valerie is suspension by the agency, the impossibility of continuing her covert work, professional disgrace, her life threatened and her contacts put in mortal danger. Joe is vilified as a sort of traitor, his consultancy business ruined, and their marriage seems to be heading for the rocks. Something not dissimilar happened to Dr David Kelly in Britain. Like Kelly, Valerie Plame needed no lessons in citizenship from her critics. Her father (played in the film by Sam Shepard) served around the world as a career officer in the US air force, her brother was wounded in Vietnam, and she applied to join the CIA while still at university.

Although the outline of this story is well known, Fair Game gives it dramatic shape and teases out the moral problems raised. We are drawn into considering urgent questions that involve our society, the world in which we live, and the conduct of those still active on the political scene and benefiting from their murky association with events that have caused so much chaos and so many deaths.