Whistleblower wentB lair who to war on
Keira Knightley stars as a GCHQ translator who tried to stop the Iraq invasion... but this movie could do with sexing up the truth
OFFICIAl Secrets tells the story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), the GCHQ whistleblower who, in 2003, leaked a potentially explosive email that could have stopped the invasion of Iraq and might have sent her to prison.
The fundamental problem with this film, which it tries but fails to overcome, is that the email didn’t explode (at least, not as it might have done), the invasion wasn’t prevented and she didn’t go to prison.
The leaked memo was splashed on the front page of The Observer newspaper and caused a flurry of outrage, which quite quickly died down.
Katharine admitted breaking the Official Secrets Act, and her case was taken up by human rights lawyer Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), who intended to defend her on the basis that she was trying to stop something illegal.
But (spoiler alert) the trial didn’t happen, either. So what we are left with is a political thriller largely devoid of thrills.
It is also a film, like many before it, in which good reporters work feverishly to break a story, stamping angrily around the newsroom, gathering conspiratorially in the editor’s office, insouciantly putting their feet up on desks, intrepidly meeting contacts in underground car parks, swearing a lot and generally making journalism look like the most exciting job in the world. I’m all for that — the Press gets rather a bad press these days, so it’s always pleasing to see journalists presented in the movies as energetic, moral crusaders, portrayed by handsome matinee idols (well, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans and Matthew Goode). But what’s the point of all that furious profanity, all those feet on desks, if nothing changes?
In All The President’s Men (1976) we saw The Washington Post exposing Watergate, which compelled Richard Nixon to resign.
Forty years later, Spotlight told us how The Boston Globe drew global attention to endemic sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
You can almost hear director Gavin Hood, whose 2015 thriller Eye In The Sky was properly gripping, straining to make the same kind of movie.
Unfortunately, and ironically, Official Secrets is fatally undermined by the truth. It is not, at least, undermined by Keira Knightley. I’m not her greatest fan, and can’t think of a single character she’s played that several of her contemporaries ( Carey Mulligan or Emma Stone, for example) couldn’t have played better.
But she’s perfectly fine here, within that limited KK repertoire of giggles and frowns.
Katharine is married to a Turk (Adam Bakri), whose application for UK residency offers another opportunity for Hood (and his co‑writers, husband‑and‑wife team Gregory and Sara Bernstein) to generate the odd twitch of excitement, which they seize with enthusiasm, even though that storyline, too, leads them nowhere very interesting.
The film makes GCHQ look a bit like The Observer newsroom, with lots of urgency — ‘Andy, where’s my Pyongyang report!?’ — although without the angry swearing. It’s hushed, as well as hush‑hush.
When Katharine gets an email from a Frank Koza at the U.S. National Security
Agency, inviting her to spy on foreign diplomats so that they might be blackmailed into supporting a UN resolution calling for an invasion of Iraq, she is quietly ablaze with righteous indignation.
We already know she’s fiercely against the prospect of war, because we’ve seen her shouting at Tony Blair on the telly.
So she prints out the email and later pops it into a letterbox, two fleeting episodes that Hood does his best to make unbearably tense, though I don’t think anyone’s fingernails will be in danger. Really, Official Secrets is the story of a woman’s conscience, some journalistic tenacity, a few legal shenanigans and very little more.
The email ends up in the hands of dogged reporter Martin Bright (Smith), whose colleagues, Peter Beaumont ( Goode) and Ed Vulliamy (Ifans, treating us to one of his untamed maverick turns), try to verify it as genuine, needing the endorsement of sceptical editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill). As it happens, Alton is now an esteemed colleague of mine at the Mail. I had coffee with him this week to see if he remembers events as the film presents them.
He doesn’t quite. And, in fact, when he sees it, he might be tempted to do a spot of Keira- style yelling at the screen himself.
Still, there’s nothing wrong with dramatic licence. This picture could do with more of it, but I suppose that would mean rewriting history. If only.
THE Peanut Butter Falcon, by contrast, is a lovely slab of make-believe, with a Down’s Syndrome actor, Zack Gottsagen, playing Zak, a kind of disabled modern version of Huckleberry Finn. The film’s quirky title is his nickname as a would-be wrestler.
After he runs away from his North Carolina care home, Zak ends up under the broken wing of Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), who is grieving for his dead older brother and is himself on the run from angry fishermen whose crabbing pots he has destroyed.
Together, with Zak’s fragrant carer ( Dakota Johnson) in hot pursuit, the pair set off by boat and then raft to find the wrestling school run by the Salt Water Redneck, Zak’s hero.
Written and directed by Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, it’s a film of terrific charm, only slightly marred by a rushed ending that oddly tosses away all the plausibility in which we have cheerfully invested for the previous 95 minutes.
Still, highly recommended.