Official Secrets is the kind of film where the most suspenseful scene is built around a grey office printer. The woman doing the printing is Katharine Gun (Knightley), the GCHQ worker who leaked a secret memo revealing a US spying campaign designed to help ratify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Eye In The Sky director Gavin Hood’s is a film full of whistleblowing deliberations, political subterfuge, journalistic legwork and out-of-date tech (you should see the chunky keyboards and HUGE floppy discs), delivered by a strong cast of reliable Brits led by a particularly powerful Keira Knightley. If it’s let down by a simplistic take on its complex subject matter, it’s still an entertaining slice of recent history celebrating an unsung British hero.
After spending time grounding Gun’s life in recognisable strokes, the film gets good dramatic mileage out of the printing of the secret memo, a tense if perhaps over-the-top visit to the postbox where Gun is paranoid she is being watched and the interview scenes, which try to flush out the whistle-blower in GCHQ. By the time the leaked memo finds it’s way to Observer journalist Martin Bright (a likable Matt Smith), it transforms into a ’70s styled thriller with meetings in underground car parks, phone calls to the White House using an alias, and lots of debates about whether it is right to publish. There is also an incredibly explosive scene involving spell-check. Honestly.
It’s Knightley’s Gun you’ll remember and admire; steely, stirring but still recognisably human.
If Official Secrets falls down it’s in a lack of confidence that an audience will follow the complex machinations, constantly recapping to make sure we are all on the same page. It also falls into too many ‘movie-movie’ tropes, be it shout-y British newspaper editors or a last-gasp attempt to stop a key character being deported. As Katharine makes the incredibly brave decision to ‘fess up and GCHQ start threatening her through Scotland Yard, she engages human-rights law firm Liberty, headed by Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes, coasting but classy), to take on her case.
Hood’s filmmaking is polished if a bit colourless and a raft of great British character actors (Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, Tamsin Greig, Jeremy Northam) do good work in under-written roles. But it’s Knightley’s Gun you’ll remember and admire; steely, stirring but still recognisably human. At one point, Gun rails against Tony Blair on TV: “Just because you’re the Prime Minister, it doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts.” What’s that line about the more things change, the more they stay the same.
