Havana, Tuesday, November 1, 2011. Year 15 / Number 303

A spectator's chronicle

Fair Game

By Rolando Pérez Betancourt

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Last Saturday night's movie came as a surprise: the political thriller Fair Game, a blunt testimony to the way the Bush administration not only lied about Iraq’s atomic weapons, but also decided to take his revenge on a prominent CIA agent with 18 years’ worth of experience with the agency and her husband Joe Wilson, a former ambassador to Africa who had been approached by his wife’s colleagues to travel there and glean information about Iraq’s “suspicious” procurement of depleted uranium and reported on his return that there was no danger that such sale had ever taken place.

Disappointed at his conclusions, the CIA put his report on ice, but on realizing that there would be war anyway, fueled by Washington’s jingoistic discourse following the downing of the Twin Towers, Wilson submitted an op-ed piece to The New York Times where he claimed to have proof that the uranium issue was nothing but a pie in the sky the White House was baking to justify the terrorist attack and the oncoming invasion.

The topic of the nuclear threat had already been addressed in the film Green Zone –already shown on Cuban TV– about the mission given to an intelligence officer in occupied Iraq to find “at all costs” evidence of nuclear weapons that never really existed.

In Fair Game, however, the plot is based on undeniably true facts that neither the CIA nor the U.S. government could hide after a high-level White House official high-handedly leaked revealed Valerie Plame’s identity to the press, the best vendetta they could think of to belie her husband’s findings.

As the film shows, life became impossible for this woman and her family thereafter.

Directed by Doug Liman and starring Sean Penn opposite a convincing Naomi Watts, Fair Game (2010) –no doubt Liman’s best film yet– is mostly based on Valerie Plame’s memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy and My Betrayal by the White House.

It’s true that in the beginning the plot gets a little too loaded with details and names to be clearly understandable to those unfamiliar with the U.S. government’s cunning designs, but soon the story gets on track and goes on smoothly as befits good filmmaking, bringing to light all sorts of high-level connivances and ill-natured characters (read CIA, governments and the like) who are certainly not resting on their laurels.

Last Saturday night's movie came on as another channel broadcast the Pan-American Games, so it’s most likely that the TV viewing figures were not too high. It goes without saying that Fair Game is in for a rerun, albeit not too late at night, because topics like this surely call for sleepless eyes and keen attention.