Fair Game (3/5 Stars)

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be about WMD’s?

On January 2003, President George W. Bush gave his State of the Union address. That speech contained these sixteen words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” One man, former ambassador to Niger Joe Wilson, found those words rather disconcerting. Why? Because he had been sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger and had concluded that the supposed sale of yellowcake uranium was nonexistent. He told the administration exactly that. But here it was presented as fact in the President’s biggest speech of the year. A big speech made even more important because it presented the administration’s case for the Iraq war. He called the State Department and they confirmed that when the President said Africa, he was talking about the supposed sale in Niger.

But this movie isn’t about that. It’s about what happened after Joe Wilson decided to call out the White House by writing a NY Times Op-Ed piece titled, “What I didn’t find in Africa.” The administration responded by doing a rather curious thing. They revealed in a national newspaper that Joe’s wife, Valerie, was a covert CIA operative. This movie is about her job and how she lost it, the media circus around it, and how it almost destroyed her marriage. The movie claims that the whole Valerie Plame debate was simply a diversionary tactic that distracted everybody from the real topic: why the administration felt that there was enough evidence to state in the biggest speech of the year that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa. In a way the administration has succeeded even in this very friendly pro-Wilson/Plame movie. We get hints as to why the administration did what they did, but it is never clearly stated. In the second half of the movie, that part of the story is all but lost. The focus becomes the marriage. We have become distracted.

In a way I am being unfair. Since this is a story based on real events and real people, it would probably not be entirely ethical to have an actor play a character named Karl Rove and have him saying, “I did this because…” If the makers of the movie don’t know, they certainly shouldn’t put words into the mouths of real people. But then again, this is a movie and the makers are telling a story. When judging a movie based on fact, one of the best questions a reviewer should ask is this: Would this still be a good movie if it were entirely fictional? If you can’t make it work, you should probably be making a documentary. (Or at the very least you should have one character ask another, “Why are they doing this?” and then the other can say, “I don’t know.”)

Case in point, one of the best scenes in the movie is when Scooter Libby, aide to the Vice President, visits the Central Intelligence Agency and interviews one-by-one the CIA agents working on nonproliferation about some aluminum tubes. One CIA agent believes that they were being used to build nuclear fuel centrifuges. All of the other CIA agents have doubts because these tubes are the wrong size, type, and haven’t been used in any nuclear fuel reactor since 1952. But of course, they aren’t certain and they shouldn’t be. It’s not like the CIA has omniscient intelligence. Libby brings up the fact that in the First Gulf War Saddam Hussein actually was working on weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs, and the CIA knew absolutely nothing about it. (For a comprehensive list of other things the CIA didn’t know or got wrong, go and read the book Legacy of Ashes.)  What Libby wants is the one agent who thinks the tubes are real evidence. As long as nobody else in the agency can tell him with 100% certainty that Hussein isn’t up to anything, he doesn’t care what he or she says. (95% isn’t good enough). Remember that line from ‘In the Loop,’ “In the land of ignorance, the man with one fact is king.”

Did that scene actually happen exactly as scripted and shot? I haven’t the slightest clue. But it is one of the best scenes because it explained the motivation of the antagonists in the story. That never happens again. We never get to know why the administration put the words in the speech or why they thought outing Valerie was a good idea. In the second half of the movie, we are shown quite a lot of talking heads on cable news bad-mouthing the Wilsons. But who are those people? Why are they saying those things? Did the administration tell them to do it? How does that work? It really isn’t enough to simply say that a smear is going on. What are the mechanics of a smear? Better yet, how do you tell if it is working? Who won this battle? What is the end result of a bunch of pundits yelling at each other on TV? The marriage survived, Libby was convicted, and a movie made. Are Joe and Valerie victors? Better yet, should we care? Because after all, isn’t the real issue WMD’s? My favorite scene in the movie takes place at a dinner party while Valerie is still a CIA operative currently working on the aluminum tubes thing. The other people at the table start up a really ignorant discussion about them, repeating all the stupid things they heard on TV. And there is Valerie sitting silently unable to discuss them in any way. Why? Because it would blow her cover to let on that she knows more than anybody at the table. Does it ever seem to you like the loudest most morally certain people around rarely know what they’re talking about?   

The movie ends with what is unfortunately becoming a movie cliché. The old “call to action.” Joe Wilson gives a speech to a classroom and implores the young people to go out there, become involved, and “do something about it.” I have passively heard this before and usually nodded my head but I will finally admit that I don’t really know what he means. Does he want me to vote Democrat or what? Should I become the annoying person at the dinner party? Should I think for myself by reading books other people recommend? Should I stop watching “Real Housewives” and get a life (i.e. do anything else)? Only one of these questions can I answer with real certainty. I prefer the way the documentary “The Cove” went about its call to action: Simply send a text message to sign a petition. Now that’s something I can do.

One more complaint: Doug Liman’s directing. He uses a hand-held camera for almost all of the shots. Bad decision. A hand-held camera tends to be shaky, unclear, and consistently out of focus in long shots. This can be annoying and distracting. There are times when a hand-held camera is called for. A documentary type film like, “JFK,” is a masterful example of that. The shaky camera in that movie works because the story itself is mysterious and unclear. A shaky camera works best as an admission from the director that the audience shouldn’t know exactly what is happening. The shakier the cam: the more uncertain the events. (This is also the reason why the History Channel uses blurred shaky cameras as well. They don’t know exactly what went on.) In this movie, Liman seems to be making the mistake that a shaky cam actually makes the movie feel more realistic and thus convincing. It doesn’t. It does the opposite. When a director wants to persuade the audience of his version of the facts, he should keep the damn camera still. Quite frankly, it also happens to be the professional thing to do. One of the first things they teach you in Broadcasting 101 is how to use a tri-pod. Come on people, this isn’t rocket science.