Mark Reviews Movies: OFFICIAL SECRETS

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2019

History has proven Katharine Gun, an employee of a British intelligence agency who became a whistleblower about shady practices leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to be correct and, hence, at least morally justified in her actions. Sixteen years later, it's becoming more and more difficult to recall the support behind the George W. Bush administration's furor to bring the United States and its allies into another conflict in the Middle East. At the time, a majority of people in the United States were in support of the war. This means, of course, that a lot of the people who now say they were against the war at the time are probably lying, but that's another story for another day.

Co-writer/director Gavin Hood's Official Secrets dramatizes Gun's whistleblowing efforts and the consequences of them, following the intelligence employee as she briefly wrestles with exposing government secrets, tries to hide her actions, and then makes a stand in the court system against government prosecution and persecution. It's potentially inspiring, although Hood and his fellow screenwriters kind of miss the mark by placing Gun's story within a framework of political hindsight.

There's another story here beyond Gun's. It's that of reporters and editors at the Observer in London, a newspaper that had decided to go all in on support for war in Iraq, for reasons that the movie doesn't especially make clear (There's a throwaway line that the center-left paper is just blindly behind the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair). The heroes here, obviously, are Katharine (Keira Knightley), political reporter Martin Bright (Matt Smith), and anyone else who stands against the war or is willing to fight for the rightness of Katharine's actions.

This isn't to suggest that the screenplay, written by Hood and the husband-wife team of Gregory and Sara Bernstein, needs to present the other side of, at best, a misguided war or, at worst, an illegal one. It is to say, though, that the filmmakers have significantly reduced the tension of their story by presenting the perception of the war through a modern mindset.

The argument at the time of this story was whether or not a conflict with Iraq was justified. In the movie, the argument against the war is treated as accepted fact. The only case being made is that the British government, knowing at the time what everyone knows now, used the threat of prosecuting Gun as a way to place doubt on what she revealed. That's a reasonable angle, of course, but it's also one that greatly diminishes the full context of what Gun did and under what circumstances she did it.

Working at the Government Communications Headquarters in 2003, Katharine receives a memo, approved by the British government after a request from the National Security Agency of the United States, to begin looking into members of the United Nations Security Council. The goal is find information that, essentially, could be used as blackmail, in order to coerce support for plans to invade Iraq. Outraged by the implications of this, Katharine mails a copy of the memo to a friend, who's a journalist and anti-war activist.

Shortly after, at the offices of the Observer, Martin gets his hands on the document and, despite pushback from editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) and with help from U.S. correspondent Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans), begins investigating the memo's authenticity. They come across assorted obstacles, and Katharine watches with helpless horror as the war, which she knows to be wrong, begins.

The story is cleanly divided into two sections, with the investigative journalism taking up much of the first half and Katharine's legal troubles being the focus of the second. That first half is fascinating, if only for how Hood presents the work of this kind of journalism as a puzzle, with pieces, which must be there for the full picture to be accurate, either missing or appearing to be wrong.

Here, for example, Martin and Ed have the name of a higher-up in the NSA connected to the memo, but because of an agency policy that won't reveal the names of their employees, the reporters can't even confirm that the man works there. There are secret meetings and ones in public under innocent appearances (A fellow reporter, played by Matthew Goode, talks shop with a contact at MI6 before playing tennis), and the entire exposé risks being derailed because of a right-wing website in the United States and a copyeditor simply doing her job.

The second half is where the story stumbles, if only because the legwork in the first half is done as well as it is. Here, we follow Katharine, going over the case with an attorney (played by Ralph Fiennes), being followed by secretive men, and having her immigrant husband's (played by Adam Barkri) legal status in the country threatened.

These are barriers of Kafkaesque absurdity (Legally, Katharine isn't allowed to discuss her case with an attorney, and her husband is scheduled to be deported before anyone can contest the decision, leading to a rather improbable race against time to the airport), but the faceless machinery of a retaliatory government feels like a generic villain. This was a time of a specific political climate, and in overlooking that, Official Secrets doesn't show us the full story of Gun's bravery and determination to do what's right.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products