Well, timing certainly worked out for director Gavin Hood (Eye in the Sky, and… X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to release a government whistleblower movie. As Washington’s own latest blower of whistles makes life increasingly unpleasant for President Donald J. Trump, so Hood has elected to make an essentially ho-hum British leaker’s tale generally unpleasant for us.
Official Secrets tells the story of improbably named Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a workaday SIGINT translator for British Intelligence, who in 2003 elected to leak to the press an NSA memo in which the US tried to sway the UN security council to vote in favor of the Iraq War. Katharine was nabbed and charged with violation of the U.K. Official Secrets Act (how clever! it’s the title!) and was eventually put on trial. All that is fine and good, but what’s not fine and good is crafting such a bleak snooze of a film out of it.
To be honest, Katharine Gun’s story was never all that captivating to me even when it was current, and in today’s post-Assange, neo-WikiLeaks maelstrom it seems downright unremarkable. (As, truthfully, does the content of the memo she leaked. How times have changed.)
I will confess upfront that I might have liked this more with different casting. I find Keira Knightley’s oh-gosh-another-flat-tire faces quite challenging to endure even in an otherwise sprightly film, and here her trademark pout and general demeanor verge on punishing. Her on-screen husband (Adam Bakri) does little to counteract this, himself less a character than a sort of perpetual celluloid chalkboard-scrape. Together, the pair are downright squirm-worthy. Your mileage, obviously, may vary, but this Haus found the pair unsympathetic, uninteresting, and unable to carry the film. By the time Ralph Fiennes turns up as Gun’s lawyer, the die is cast, the gloom has triumphed, and even Fiennes in all his legal Fiennery(TM) is unable to inject sustainable interest. So the story putters on, ultimately climaxing with a courtroom scene, which was interesting chiefly for the wigs.
Oh, it’s not a terrible movie. It’s paced decently well (if slowly), and the acting is serviceable–what I really take issue with is what it’s all in service of. Hood has tried his level best here to paint Gun as a staunch moral hero, but what she did feels small and not all that daring (and the war started anyway, of course). The Iraq WMD hoodwink was one of many unsightly knots in the post-9/11 political tapestry, but Hood’s revisionist efforts to drape his retrospective condemnation of the Iraq war around this one woman seem frankly forced. Like Hood, I certainly disagree with the U.S.’s approach to swaying coalition support for the Iraq War — but unlike Hood, I don’t think it’s appropriate to use similarly strong-armed tactics on the audience. If a film is going to be this preachy and force feed us a Knightley-centric whitewash of 2003-era British leaking, for golly’s sake man, at least make it interesting.
Hood’s 2015 Eye in the Sky wasn’t a bad movie, but I certainly didn’t walk out of it wishing it had been even flatter and even lower budget, with its nose thrust even further in the obscurities of British intelligence law. And yet…
Haus Verdict: Perhaps my Pride begets my Prejudice, but I didn’t Love it, Actually. In its Aftermath, we can only hope for Atonement from Keira. Okay, I’m done — never to Begin Again.
Official Secrets is playing now–it opened Friday, August 30.
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