Which is exactly what happens to Naomi Watts' character in the taut, shattering Fair Game. That the character happens to be Valerie Plame, the real-life CIA operative exposed by higher-ups in the Bush administration - blowing her cover and endangering a network of contacts - only makes the story more powerful. And maddening.
Directed by Doug Liman (who launched a pretty decent spy franchise with The Bourne Identity), from a tight script by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, Fair Game focuses on the relationship between Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson (a quietly volatile Sean Penn). From the vantage of neighbors and friends, Plame and Wilson are just a couple of busy, successful Washingtonians. Two kids. Nice house. He consults. She works in energy analysis.
Behind Valerie and Joe's front door, however, it's another matter. "All we've been doing is leaving Post-Its for each other," gripes the husband, frustrated that Valerie's frequent, and mysterious, trips overseas have left him without a wife, and also without a clue. "If you went missing," he rages, "I could never tell anybody - because you weren't there."
But they've managed - until the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration was looking for proof of weapons of mass destruction. Plame returns from a trip with data that says there is no active nuclear program. Wilson, dispatched to Niger to investigate rumors of the sale of enriched uranium, reports that no such deal took place.
And then Operation Iraqi Freedom begins, based on "information" about aluminum tubes and enriched uranium that both Plame and Wilson had debunked. He's mad, and writes an op-ed piece in the New York Times decrying the war and the excuses used to launch it.
