As the year’s pass, the deceitful excuses and the disturbing decision by the Bush Administration to wage war against Iraq in 2003 grow increasingly criminal. The continuous barrage of first-hand knowledge that has been revealed over the last 15 years since the invasion, has made it quite clear that the intelligence community distorted facts and manipulated the American people. This shameful time in American history has resulted in a slew of scathing films (fiction and non-fiction) and the latest zeroing in on this topic— following its recent appearance in Adam McKay‘s satirical Dick Cheney biopic “Vice“— is “Official Secrets,” by South African director Gavin Hood (“Eye in the Sky”).
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Hood takes an outside approach to the story (non-American) and sets his sights on the true story of a female British intelligence gatherer who set out to tell the truth about what her cohorts were doing in their attempt to mislead the world into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). However, despite the good intentions, Hood’s film turns out to be a pedestrian and uninspired account of an important and vital political heroine.
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Keira Knightley plays Katherine Gun, an agent working for the GCHQ, an intelligence agency partnership between the U.S. and the U.K. which is in the business of intercepting communications between world countries. Gun’s distaste for Tony Blair‘s sucking up to President Bush’s agenda is intensified when she receives an email from the NSA showing that the GCHQ is blackmailing UN Security Council members in order to get them to vote on a resolution approving the U.S. and U.K.’s decision to go to the war. This enrages Gun and she sets out to expose her agency by leaking the email to The Observer, a violation of the Official Secrets Act, which kick-starts a chain reaction from the media and British government alike.
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An internal investigation is launched at the GCHQ, which leads to Katharine stepping forward and confessing to the crime. At the same time, reporter Martin Bright (Matt Smith) gets his hands on the documents, but it takes a lot of convincing for Observer editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) to run the story. The email sent by Gun is rather hard to authenticate, even when pros like Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) and Washington reporter Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans) do their damnedest to do so.
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The thick of the drama in “Official Secrets” is focused on its main character’s life spiraling out of control when the government attacks her credibility and seeks to not only destroy her life, including deporting her Muslim husband Yasar (Adam Bakri), but also make her face potential imprisonment. Gun’s story alone has the makings of an exciting cinematic treatise on whistleblowing, truth-seeking morality, and governmental dishonesty, but Hood shoots it in such a pedantic, visually dull fashion that watching the film gives off the feeling of reading Gun’s story on Wikipedia. There’s just no pace or pulse.
Even more problematic is the fact that Hood decides to concentrate on a handful of side characters, rather than Gun’s story. In fact, she disappears for long stretches on end, crushing any kind of momentum that may have been built from her story. Hood, taking a cue from “All the President’s Men,” follows the journalists who investigated the email and then, later on, Katherine’s attorneys, including a human rights lawyer headed by Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes). The story does eventually return to Katherine, but she never drives the dramatic action, and the film never recovers.
This back and forth from Hood and editor Megan Gill renders a rather choppy feel to the film, a two-hour drama which doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be. It doesn’t help that it ends anti-climatically in a courtroom battle which feels clichéd and typical.
The botching of this material is a shame considering Knightley gives her character interesting shadings and depth in a strong performance. Meanwhile, Fiennes’s role feels incomplete, a caricature of other, more nuanced, heroic cinematic lawyers that we’ve seen before.
And so, this rather too-polished and pedantic film lacks any kind of identity and is ultimately a failed attempt at relitigating an important and all-too-relevant time in political history when the government weaponized propaganda to feed to the masses and valiant journalists tried to call them out their schemes. Based on the non-fiction book “The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War,” ultimately, Katherine Gun’s courage to do the right thing is lost in this misguided, by-the-book attempt at fictionalizing her story. Hood, tries, but fails to truly demonstrate the greater consequences with much impact and in the end, this true hero deserves better. [C-]
Check out all our coverage from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival here.