There’s something interestingly tough and forthright about this slow-burner from director and co-writer Gavin Hood. It is a beady-eyed spy drama that has shrewd things to say about the British establishment’s tendency to spite under pressure, about the eternal duality of cockup and conspiracy, about the Kafkaesque problems involved in defending yourself legally against a treason charge, and, importantly, about the kind of young, vulnerable people that we end up depending on to tell us how we are governed.
Official Secrets shows that spy dramas from real life are very often not action thrillers such as Bond or Bourne or Homeland – or indeed Hood’s last movie, Eye in the Sky, from 2015 – but something more like nuclear-level office politics.
Based on actual events, Official Secrets is a biographical take on the story of Katharine Gun, who blew the whistle on a top secret memo involving the US-Iraq war of 2003. Her courageous act of leaking the memo to the press not only put her in breach of the Official Secrets Act but also her personal life in jeopardy.
The working life of the Observer is boisterously and affectionately represented. Rhys Ifans plays renowned reporter Ed Vulliamy as a passionately angry critic of the government; Matt Smith plays Martin Bright – who wrote the original story – and Hanako Footman plays young journalist Nicole Mowbray, whose chaotic, innocent mistake in transcribing the email, replacing its American spellings with British ones, caused the story to be initially rubbished by online conspiracists in the US. Conleth Hill plays the Observer’s editor Roger Alton who, despite his pro-government line, comes out of this rather well. It is his honest lust for a good story that causes him to publish.
If that sounds to you like a cast that could carry almost any movie, you would be right. This script doesn’t particularly need carrying—the vitality of this story speaks for itself—but, because of the amount of ground this story covers, the film often prioritizes theme over character. It’s not a bad choice, per se, but don’t come into Official Secrets looking for a finely-wrought character drama.
When Katharine admits to her superior at GCHQ that she leaked the memo, she is taken in for questioning. She explains that she was not trying to overthrow her country and that her loyalty was not to the government but to the English people. She is subsequently charged with treason under the Official Secrets Act. She faces the possibility of prison and must also cope with the government's dirty tricks against her Muslim husband.
This complicated thriller is skillfully guided by director Gavin Hood who reveals the role of The Observer newspaper journalists (Matt Smith and Rhys Ifans) and the brilliance and creativity of Gun's defense lawyer (Ralph Fiennes). Keira Knightly is very persuasive as Katharine Gun and manages to sustain the dramatic tension of the story right through to the courtroom finale.
The acting is top notch. Kiera Knightly plays her role with gravitas. She is nervous as Katharine, but defiant and articulate under duress. Particularly good are the scenes when the Foreign Office decides to deport her Kurdish Iraqi husband, in petty revenge for the leak. Her brave mask drops then, to show a woman desperate, almost hysterical, pulling out all the stops to save the man she loves from being sent back to the country he escaped from.
The person defending Katharine is Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), a Barrister specializing in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. Fiennes uses facial and head movements in short and memorable scenes. The most memorable is when a shadow of a smile flits across his troubled face when he is pleased with, and admires, Katharine’s response to a question he has posed
Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg has said that Katharine Gun was responsible "for the most important and courageous leak I have ever seen. No one else — including myself — has ever done what Gun did: tell secret truths at personal risk; before an imminent war; in time, possibly to avert it." Even though the invasion of Iraq was not stopped, Gun's act of conscience raised the debate about its legality to a different level. We need more like her in today's world.
Just because Official Secrets feels like a period drama now doesn’t mean it’s not extremely relevant to our current political culture. If stories are, first and foremost, about the time in which they are told, then Official Secrets is a desperate and effective plea to modern audiences to better hold our most powerful institutions accountable before it’s too late.
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