Official Secrets **** (2019, Keira Knightley, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Ralph Fiennes) – Movie Review

Keira Knightley is well cast and on excellent form in Official Secrets (2019) as British Intelligence whistle-blower Katharine Gun, who leaked to the British press a top-secret NSA memo exposing a joint US-UK illegal spying operation against members of the UN Security Council, designed to force the Council into sanctioning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Matt Smith is also excellent as laid-back British journalist Martin Bright, who persuades his editor to publish the leaked document in The Observer newspaper in London. Ralph Fiennes enters the film belatedly, but truly impresses as the non-profit lawyer doggedly representing Gun.

Knightley carries the film, Smith supports it and Fiennes raises its game. Game, set and match to the British thespians. There are several other exceptional performances in the film, Matthew Goode, Conleth Hill, MyAnna Buring. Tamsin Greig, Hattie Morahan, Ray Panthaki, Kenneth Cranham and Jeremy Northam among them.

Director Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets (2019) is ‘based on actual events’. The screenplay by Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein and Gavin Hood is based on the book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion. I wonder why they changed the title for the movie.

Given that it is ‘based on actual events’, I hope we can trust what we see unfolding in the film. It certainly feels entirely truthful and credible in its detailed, multi-layered, widespread condemnation of the forces of darkness that govern us.

It is a thrilling whistle-blower story, both as drama and as a revelation of what really goes in the name of democracy in the UK and the US. It all happened a while ago, it seems like the pages of long-ago history, but its relevance is immediate and of today.

The drama rattles along breathlessly. Rarely recently have 112 minutes vanished so quickly. Audiences have to have their wits about them, but close attention is repaid over and over again in this very fine film. Its complications and extended time-frame canvas are kept brilliantly crisp and clear by Gavin Hood, who directs tensely and dynamically. This is hard to do and he does it triumphantly.

[Spoiler alert] The film ends in just the right place, not with Knightley as expected, but with Fiennes and Northam on the beach. It’s a great finish.

I’ve been trying to imagine Tony Blair watching this film, and wondering what he made of it.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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