There’s a solid argument that W. was the very worst president of the modern era. I write this with full knowledge and acceptance of the dumpster fire and his collection of swamp creatures currently infesting the White House. For all his faults, W. is roughly a zillion times a greater human being than Orange Julius Caesar. Still, Trump hasn’t yet brought war. While W., along with 99.99% of all other human beings, is far more truthful than Trump, it is arguable that W.’s big lie was quite a bit bigger than any of Trump’s many, many, many falsehoods. W. lied to get us into war. That’s more serious than paying off a porn star, doctoring a weather map, claiming a birth certificate is fake, pretending the Mueller Report exonerated him, and literally thousands of other fabrications, doncha agree?
Hmmm, after poring over the extensive list of consequential lies Trump has offered, I’m no longer confident with my thesis. Suffice to say: Trump sucks, but let’s not overlook the awful of W., OK? The bar just gets lower and lower for the GOP.
Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) worked for GCHQ [read: British Intelligence] in the early part of 2003. Her specific branch was devoted to collecting, disseminating, and forwarding messages of all kinds to the government officials who needed them. Somewhere after we’ve established the heroine, her Kurdish refugee husband Yasar Gun (Adam Bakri), and the political theater post-9/11, Katharine intercepted a memo dictating the details of America’s less-than-honest collection of Iraqi intel and the use thereof to strongarm a favorable (sorry “favourable”) UN resolution to invade Iraq. So, hey, what would you do? The US wants to invade Iraq. The UK wants to invade Iraq. The only thing stopping them is the sluggishness of the UN (and, for some reason, UL Washington, UB40, and the UM basketball team. Go Terps!) Now suppose you suddenly get a sheet of paper from a factual, verifiable source stating the US is fabricating the intel and presenting the UN with bullshit in order to force war, what do you do?
Before you answer that, understand the UK Official Secrets act of 1989 which says effectively, “don’t do it.”
Vacillating between being a brave defender of human rights and a piece of furniture, Katharine leaks her memo to reporters and is forever (or at least until the end of the film) under the Gun. Well, you gone and done it, now, KG. You have no recourse left but to act for the rest of the film. The terrible side effects of leaking an important political memo in Great Britain are that people like Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, and Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) show up. You can count on them to chew scenery whilst the film awaits its stunning conclusion.
We’ve seen this film, of course. In fact, we’ve seen it several times from All the President’s Men to Truth to Spotlight. That’s not bad company to be in, but it is company. What light exactly are you going to shed on this, Official Secrets? W. led us into war under false pretenses? Yeah, we knew that one. The hawks bullied the truth-tellers? We knew that one, too. Katharine Gun was jailed and prosecuted for whistleblowing? Not really news, either, unfortunately. Hence, the key to the film is how much you buy into the tension of the moment and, less one scene in which Yasar is forcibly deported, there isn’t much of that, either.
As far as my limited research has revealed, screenwriters Gregory Bernstein and Sara Bernstein are unrelated to Carl Bernstein, the investigative journalist who, along with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate scandal. But … c’mon … Two Bernsteins penning a Bernsteinian tale? Coincidence? I can’t Bernstein bear it.
The news this week has been replete with the word “whistleblower.” This is both simultaneously the most beloved and most loathed position in the world depending on who or what is being exposed. No single term will endure more hypocrisy than “whistleblower.” That aside, since Official Secrets is all about whistleblowing, I cannot tell if the film is prescient or hopelessly dated. I’m siding on the latter, as will be reflected in my rating. For one thing, the exposure of the Iraq War for what it was is the greatest journalism failure of our generation; excusing yourselves after the fact is folly. Excusing yourselves decades later is idiocy. The problem right now is that journalism has changed dramatically in the interim. When the exposure of secrets comes to life, we no longer ask our journalists to seek the truth, we ask them to color our truth. Trump puts pressure on Ukraine to help his 2020 election chances and we all look to our sources to see if the fallout of this particular piece of news hinders or helps. If truth mattered, Trump would have lost 2016 in a landslide. This film is almost 17 years too late and presently sadly irrelevant.
There once was a CGHQ jock
Who found a big secret ‘bout Iraq
For all of her keen
It’s twenty nineteen
Our response is more bored than shock
Rated R, 112 Minutes
Director: Gavin Hood
Writer: Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein, Gavin Hood
Genre: Get this … the Iraq War inducing intel was fabricated! You don’t say!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Katharine Gun
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “Too little, too late”
