"FAIR GAME" - THE FILM

Saturday night, I started to watch Fair Game, the 2010 movie based on Valerie Plame's memoir of the same title that tells the story of the events that led to Plame's outing as a covert CIA officer in a column in the Washington Post by Robert Novak.  Novak attributed the leak to two senior officials in the Bush administration.

Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, had served as a diplomat and ambassador in several countries in Africa. In 2002, at the request of the CIA, Wilson traveled to Niger to investigate a claim that the government had sold yellowcake, a refined form of uranium, to the Iraqis.  In his report to the CIA after he returned, Wilson concluded that documents upon which the claim was based were forgeries and, after speaking to several government officials in Niger, that no such sale ever took place.

In January, 2003, George W Bush claimed in his State of the Union speech, "The British government has learned that the government of Saddam Hussein recently sought  significant quantities of uranium from Africa."  When Wilson learned he was one of the supposed sources for the yellowcake claim, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, titled What I Didn't Find in Africa, rebutting the claim and undermining the Bush administration's case for the invasion of Iraq earlier in the year.

As the story unfolded, my feelings of despair during the run up to the Iraq war and the immediate aftermath came flooding back.  When the real-life filmed scenes of the bombing in Iraq appeared on the screen, I stopped the film, because I knew I would not sleep at all if I continued to watch.

Sunday morning, I watched the rest of the movie from were I'd left off.  Though I fully realized at the time that the invasion of Iraq was launched on the basis of lies, I remember being shocked and incredulous that people in the Cheney/Bush maladministration would destroy the lives and reputations of two faithful public servants.  The Wilsons believe that the purpose of Plame's outing was to discredit Joe and the information in the op-ed in the NYT.  The attacks took a toll on the personal lives of Plame and Wilson that cannot be overstated.

Launching a war on lies and deception is the larger evil, and the tragic consequences of the unnecessary invasion continue today.  Why then did I find the attacks on Plame and Wilson so shocking at the time?  In hindsight, I think the revelations of the Plame/Wilson affair confirmed my worst fears about the Cheney/Bush maladministration in a way that made the ugliness of the larger picture of the Bush years easier to comprehend and all the more distressing.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are utterly believable as Plame and Wilson.  I loved Sam Sheppard in his brief appearance as Sam Plame, Valerie's father.

After I told Tom about the movie, he wanted to watch it, and, since my viewing was interrupted, I wanted to see the film again without interruption before I mailed the DVD back to Netflix.  We watched together - for me this time with more detachment and somewhat less distress.  When fictional movies are disturbing, I always tell myself it's only a movie, but Fair Game is the story of the lives of real people that I watched play out in the news not so very many years ago, years that I would not wish to relive under any circumstances.