It’ll all come out in the wash eventually. Why make someone spend an entire night binging a story when they can get all they need from a traditional movie? They act as closing arguments for the power of concisely summarizing historically important events in just two hours. If we are truly nearing the tail end of the two-hour, theatrically-released film’s run of dominance, then movies like Official Secrets, last year’s The Front Runner, Oliver Stone’s own whistleblower movie Snowden, or Amazon’s upcoming The Report – starring Adam Driver as a Senate staffer charged with investigating the CIA’s post-911 “enhanced torture” program – are a dying breed. Spending a little extra time with the story would both better inform and give us more of a sense of what it felt like for Gun to, spoiler, spend 6 months of her life unsure if she was even going to be charged with anything or what happened to the Observer’s reporters after their article was unjustly discredited due to spellcheck errors. This is a movie that informs but doesn’t completely grip you or pull you into the emotions of Gun’s arduous journey, despite Knightley’s best efforts. How much influence if any did Gun’s trial have on the inquiry? Did her righteous lawyer Ben Emmerson or the journalist Martin Bright have anything to do with it? Why did the inquiry start in 2009, finish in 2011 and not produce its final report into 20-freakin’-16? How did Tony Blair respond? Why hasn’t any of this political shade stretched past the Atlantic and fallen onto Bush, a figure now bizarrely remembered as “not as bad as Trump”? And what does any of this say about the power of the press and our beloved mythology about Woodward and Bernstein taking down a US President? Why couldn’t The Observer have done the same with Tony Blair?Ī Limited Series or multi-part documentary would have a better shot at capturing that than a prestige drama with awards ambitions, but even if you just want to tell Katharine Gun’s story and not continue on into the Iraq Inquiry a Limited Series would probably be better at it than Official Secrets. That last part feels like a movie unto itself. Then, text on the screen solemnly reminds us of the total lives lost in the ill-fated Iraq war and then tells us that 7 years after Gun first tried to expose her government’s lies an official inquiry found even more evidence of the ways the Bush and Blair administrations conspired to lie us into war. (Last year’s On the Basis of Sex attempted a similar “and now here’s the real person!” trick at the end.) Instead, we switch to news footage of the real Gun walking out of a courthouse and being interviewed by the press, removing Knightley from the screen at the most important moment. The movie, for example and spoiler, just ends without so much as a final, dramatic reunion between Gun and her husband Yasar (played by Adam Bakri), the pair meant to be the emotional center of the story. Official Secrets is so busy with the business of honoring the truth sayers and condemning the powerful that it does lose track of its emotional throughline. We saying and say nothing until things are really rotten.” “The question the film asks for any of us is, ‘When do you speak up?’ When do we, as people within an organization, speak up at the risk of losing our job? And the truth is, most people tend to support the status quo. It’s not that complicated,” Hood told Total Film. “You look at the story of Katharine Gunn and you get it. If nothing else, Official Secrets is a rather effective roadmap for how a whistleblower complaint works its way through the system, but it wants to be that as well as tribute to Gun and anyone who would dare speak truth to power. However, the overall effect of switching lead characters – from Gun to Bright to Emmerson – and condensing a year of legal history into a two-hour story gives Official Secrets the feel of an interesting magazine article or perhaps a star-studded episode of Law & Order: UK posing as a movie.
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