THE WASHINGTON POST.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019EZ20
Movies
Official Secrets
A timely tale of whistleblower anguish
BY ANN HORNADAY
K
eira Knightley spends a
lot of time looking tense
and nauseous in “Offi-
cial Secrets,” wherein
she plays real-life whistleblower
Katharine Gun. In 2003, Gun was
working as a translator for Brit-
ish intelligence when she be-
came privy to correspondence
indicating that the United States
and the United Kingdom were
conspiring to blackmail other
countries in the U.N. Security
Council into supporting an inva-
sion of Iraq. The information
made it into the press, Gun ad-
mitted that she was the leaker,
and she was eventually tried un-der the country’s Official Secrets
Act.
Directed with workmanlike ef-
ficiency by Gavin Hood from a
script he co-wrote with GregoryBernstein and Sara Bernstein,
“Official Secrets” revisits Gun’s
story with an emphasis on the
alternately clubby and labyrin-
thine institutions she came upagainst, as well as the emotional
damage she incurred when she
made a decision that some viewed
as heroic and others as a betrayal.
Although Knightley’s Gun often
seems to be a passive figure, buf-
feted by the machinations of those
around her, the film’s honesty
about the enormous personal
costs of whistleblowing is a wel-
come relief from more romanti-
cized heroics.
Hood has enlisted a fabulous
cast of supporting actors to play
the men who help and hinder
Gun’s attempt at moral clarity,
including Ralph Fiennes as her
idealistic but also practical-mind-
ed attorney, Matt Smith and Mat-
thew Goode as editors of the Lon-
don Observer, and Rhys Ifans,
who delivers a histrionic portrayal
of the Observer reporter who
broke Gun’s story.
“Official Secrets” succumbs to
cliches of the genre — a scene
staged in a parking garage is no less
predictable for a character invok-
ing Deep Throat — and it doesn’texemplify scintillating filmmaking.
But what the film lacks in style it
makes up for in the kind of dogged,
unselfconscious integrity that Gun
comes to stand for and that, in light
of the bizarre turns U.S. and British
politics have taken in intervening
years, feels increasingly like an arti-
fact of the past.
It’s sickening to revisit the dis-
sembling, self-deceptions and
outright lies that led to a misad-
venture that still reverberates to-
day; it’s even more troubling to
consider that very little seems to
have been learned, and no one
held to account, as a result.
Like the upcoming drama “The
Report,” about the Senate investi-
gation into alleged torture at CIA
black sites, “Official Secrets” uses
the recent past to invite viewers to
interrogate our present and, more
specifically, what they’re willing to
risk to prevent a disastrous future.
[email protected]NICK WALL/IFC FILMSR. At area theaters. Contains
strong language. 112 minutes.Colorful supporting cast
elevates this British
true story of exposing
government secrets
ROBERT VIGLASKY/IFC FILMSTOP: Keira Knightley stars as Katharine Gun, a translator for
British intelligence who leaked information about the lead-up to
the invasion of Iraq. ABOVE: Matt Smith plays an editor at the
London Observer in the film set in the early 2000s.