(Keira Knightley)
Keira
Knightley leads an excellent cast in this tense, whistleblower thriller set in
England in 2003 during the build-up to the second Iraq war. (8/10 Review by
Patrick Compton)
South Africa’s most prominent movie export
– outside of Charlize Theron – is writer-director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) who impresses once again with
this true-to-life thriller about a whistleblower at Britain’s GCHQ (Government
Communications Headquarters), outside Cheltenham, as the drums begin beating
for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) is a
quietly-spoken worker at the surveillance unit, a Mandarin translator whose
work involves dealing with a steady flow of radio intercepts. One day she is
one of about a 100 fellow workers to receive a memo from GCHQ’s American
cousin, the NSA, asking for scraps of information, personal or otherwise, about
UN delegates from “swing” countries, that could be used to secure UN backing
for a hoped-for invasion.
In other words, she is expected to
acquiesce in a request for information that could be used to blackmail or bully
reluctant countries into supporting the war. This is not what she has signed on
for and Gun is suitably outraged. As she later dramatically points out under
interrogation, she is not working for the British Government but the British
people, and she is not in the business of gathering information so that the
government can lie to them.
What to do? Knowing full well that publicising
this memo risks prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, Gun agonises before
making a fateful decision ...
Hood has made a lean, understated,
suspenseful thriller that includes a vitally strong central performance from
Knightley as the initially reluctant Gun who is not a politically active person
and, to make matters more complicated, is married to a Kurd whose
naturalisation credentials are under scrutiny.
The film focuses, firstly, on Gun, the
choices available to her and the consequences she fears. Secondly, we are given
an insight into the British media industry’s involvement in the rush to war. We
learn that the memo, through a sequence of dramatic events, eventually lands up
in the hands of Observer journalist Martin Bright (Matt Smith, the Duke of
Edinburgh in The Crown) who liaises
with fellow scribes Ed Vulliamy (flamboyantly played by Rhys Ifans) and Peter
Baumant (Matthew Goode) as the newspaper (which supports the war) debates
whether to publish. Finally, we follow Gun’s legal battle partly through the
eyes of her lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, effectively played by Ralph Fiennes.
The point of the film is clear to see, of
course, and South Africans will be put in mind of all the leaks they have
received from courageous whistleblowers who have revealed the corrupt ways of
the Zuma government and their Gupta enablers, a series of events that is surely
worth a film of its own.
Gun, who would surely have remained a
murky, barely-known character in the story of the disastrous Iraq war without
the publicity of this movie, receives what many would consider the ultimate of
accolades from the famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who
described her leak as the “most important and courageous I have ever seen.
No-one has ever done what Katharine Gun did: tell secret truths at personal
risk before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it.”
The irony, of course, is that Gun’s actions
did not prevent the invasion, because George W Bush and his British poodle,
Tony Blair, were determined to prosecute the war, regardless of whether it was
illegal, unnecessary, or immoral.
Knightley’s powerful and sensitive
performance as an ordinary person faced with extraordinary choices ensures that
what could have been a dry political film, however pertinent, receives the kind
of human face and personality that compels the emotional identification of
audiences.
Official
Secrets, which opened on December 13, 2019, is
showing at Gateway. – Patrick Compton
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