A Political Thriller on a Personal Level

by Sandra Olmsted

Director Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets takes us back to post-9/11 and the 2003 political machinations to get the U.N. Security Council to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Hood’s footnote to those historical events reveals the cost to one whistleblower, Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley). While watching Tony Blair on TV, Gun rails, “Just because you’re Prime Minister, it doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts!” Gun was not alone as televised images of the record-setting, world-wide, anti-war protests played alongside politicians trying to convince skeptical people that the war was necessary. Political intrigue aside, the story focuses on Gun’s internal struggle, the cost to her, and the threat her decisions pose to her immigrant husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri), a Kurdish-Turk, who came to England seeking asylum.
Katherine and Yasar Gun have a loving and comfortable life until one communiqué crosses Katherine’s desk. As a Mandarin translator for Britain’s secretive Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), she knows that whistleblowing is treason. Each step of the way to her being charged and tried for violating the Official Secrets Act is fraught with her battle with her own conscience. Yasar can’t understand why she won’t just let it go and live happily as they are because she “doesn’t know what war is like” which turns out to be the wrong argument to make to Katherine. As Katherine takes the memo and gives it to a former colleague turned an anti-war leader, who eventually passes it on to Martin Bright (Matt Smith), a reporter for The Observer, Katherine knows her actions are both ethically right and legally wrong.

Katherine, however, can’t sit idle when the United States’ National Security Agency asks U.K. intelligence to spy on UN Security Council members so that the Bush Administration can blackmail them into approving the UN mandate justifying the invasion of Iraq. While Bright’s colleagues Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) and Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans) research the memo, editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) wavers on printing the memo. When it is printed, the political analysts believe it is a fake thanks to spell check, and Katherine thinks that it will all blow over. Then, she faces interrogation and bravely stands up for her actions even when the British government pressures her by deporting Yasar. Katherine’s lawyer, Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), comes up with a usual defense based on Katherine’s own insistence that she passed the memo on because her allegiance was to people, not the government.

In this true story based on Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion, Katherine Gun’s heroism provides the backbone of the action. Hood’s decision to make her internal struggle the central focus of his political thriller has its problems; however, the question of what will Katherine have to sacrifice becomes the most suspenseful element.
While internal struggles are difficult to make exciting or even film, Official Secrets has some of the best performances of the year, especially those by Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, and Matthew Goode. Hood, who also co-wrote the screenplay, sticks to the personal costs even though he evokes All the President’s Men in the newspaper scenes. The exceptional work of editor Megan Gill and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister perfectly illustrates the deep connection between editing and shooting. Hood also relies on Paul Hepker and Mark Kilian’s score to highlight the tension and suspense. In theaters now, Official Secrets, an IFC Films release, is rated R for language and runs a detail-packed 112 minutes.

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