Movie Review: Official Secrets

Official Secrets ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Gavin Hood.

Written by: Gregory Bernstein and Sara Bernstein and Gavin Hood based on the book by Marcia Mitchell and Thomas Mitchell.

Starring: Keira Knightley (Katharine Gun), Matt Smith (Martin Bright), Matthew Goode (Peter Beaumont), Rhys Ifans (Ed Vulliamy), Adam Bakri (Yasar Gun), Indira Varma (Shami Chakrabarti), Ralph Fiennes (Ben Emmerson), Conleth Hill (Roger Alton), Tamsin Greig (Elizabeth Wilmshurst), Hattie Morahan (Yvonne Ridley), Ray Panthaki (Kamal Ahmed), Angus Wright (Mark Ellison), Chris Larkin (Nigel Jones), Jeremy Northam (Ken MacDonald).

 

Official Secrets is the story of Katherine Gun, who in the lead up to the Iraq war, worked for British intelligence as a translator. She knew that the intelligence didn’t really support the war, and that both the American and Iraqi governments were lying about it – and eventually her conscience gets the best of her – and she leaks an internal memo from the Americans, to the British, requesting information on members of the UN Security council, that could be used to essentially blackmail them to voting for the war. She didn’t do this for personal gain – in fact, it was a tremendous personal risk to her, as she could be fired and charged, and her Muslim refugee husband could end up being deported. It is a great story – and not one all that well-known outside of England. And yet, the movie that tells the story is more than a little dull – and never quite hits the way it should.

 

I think the reason the film doesn’t really work is because co-writer/director Gavin Hood never really settles on the story he wants to tell. He has essentially made three movies here – and none of them work as well as they should. One of the movies is about Gun herself – played in a fine performance by Keira Knightley, as a woman who gets increasingly exasperated with what she knows are lies, leading her country to war, and eventually breaks and leaks the document – and then has second thoughts. When the leak is discovered, and she is discovered the leaker, the pressure mounts on her – and her husband.

 

The second movie is about the reporters who eventually get the memo. They work for a paper that is pro-war – but cannot resist a good story. They have trouble verifying the story – and they have to go to print still not 100% sure that they are correct – even though they have vetted it as much as they can. This part is probably the weakest – because it’s the most well-known and clichéd part – and as talented as some of the actors (Rhys Ifans, Matthew Goode, Matt Smith) are, they cannot quite breathe life into it.

 

The third movie starts late – and centers of a lawyer played by Ralph Fiennes, who decides to take on the case for Katherine, when the government seems to be coming for her guns blazing. His challenge is to mount a defense for a woman who has confessed her crime, and is charged under a law that pretty much says the government can do whatever they want. His only defense is that the war was illegal – so therefore, what Katherine did to try and stop it wasn’t.

 

I will say that the movie builds to a satisfying courtroom climax – the rare courtroom climax that literally did surprise me, and would be the type of thing you wouldn’t believe unless it were true. It hits just the right notes in that climax.

 

But the rest of the movie feels a little too bland, a little too predictable, a little too stolid and solid, without really digging very deep. It’s all very British in a reserved way – but without the subtlety that can sometimes come along with it. The film holds your interest, without ever being very involving. It’s just kind of there.