Official Secrets review: A competently told whistleblower drama

Official Secrets, a new political drama about an English whistleblower during the Iraq War, is a timely and compelling film, but one can’t help but wish for a bolder take.

There’s a moment in Official Secrets where a colleague of Katharine Gun, English whistleblower, is ashamed by her inaction in the face of illegal government activity and turns up at Gun’s house to offer support. Katharine comforts her, saying that she didn’t do anything wrong. Unpersuaded, the friend counters, “I didn’t do anything right, either.” In a lot of ways, that exchange sums up the entire film. Official Secrets is genuinely not bad, but at the end of the day is that enough?

Keira Knightley plays Katharine Gun, a translator at a private security firm who encounters a memo from the NSA asking for information that could assist the US and the UK in strongarming reluctant members of the UN security council into supporting the Iraq War.

Shocked by this act and seeing it as an attempt to force the British people to go to war under false pretenses, she makes the decision to leak the memo to a friend in the anti-war movement, a choice that violates the terms of the Official Secrets Act. Her hope is that it will be investigated and her conscience will be clear. Instead, the full memo is published by the Observer, and it isn’t long before she faces the consequences of her noble but illegal act.

The film has an incredibly strong cast, with Knightley, Matt Smith (playing Martin Bright, the journalist who investigates the memo), and Ralph Fiennes (as Gun’s defense attorney) putting in particularly compelling performances. As far as the acting goes for the entire sprawling ensemble cast, it’s beyond reproach. Where Official Secrets is let down is in the construction and editing of the narrative.

There are moments of genuine energy, where Katharine is being interviewed in prison or the scenes where the staff at the Observer debate how to treat the memo, but too often the plot stagnates, seemingly satisfied with going from plot point to plot point without much style. The compartmentalized nature of the narrative only adds to the problem. It seems to be broken down into three distinct sections — Katharine’s whistleblowing, the press team reporting on the case, and Katharine’s legal defense — which are presented so separately within the film that there’s an almost complete lack of interplay that could have lent Official Secrets a much-needed richness and depth.

Nevertheless, it is an inherently compelling story told competently, and Keira Knightley does an excellent job of building out Katharine’s moral code so that at every point in the film her decisions are believable and in character. There are flashes of All the President’s Men in many of the scenes with the reporting team that broke the story, and there really could have been an entire movie just from the perspective of the press (nevertheless, the decision to center the film with Katharine as the emotional heart was, I think, the right one).

Overall, Official Secrets does its job and does it fairly well, but one can’t help thinking that the end result is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

Official Secrets comes to theaters August 23, 2019. This film was reviewed at the Boston Independent Film Festival.