The Keira Knightly Led 'Official Secrets' Is "A Movie To Be Admired"

OFFICIAL SECRETS

★★★1/2

At a time in which Donald Trump lies so much that the numbers must be collated by a team of data trackers — the US President averaging an absurd 10 false claims per day — it feels quaint to return to the flip-phone days of early 2003. Back then, the US government was really only selling the world one big lie: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The UK and Australian governments fell in line, and, despite huge public resistance, UN disapproval, and the obviousness of the lie, the war effort rolled on unabated, and Iraq was invaded.

Official Secrets is a Keira Knightly-starring dramatisation of an incredible act of moral defiance that, in the clusterfuck of contemporary political disinformation, is shocking in its clarity. Which, in turn, makes the story of whistleblower Katharine Gun an easy fit for movie lionisation. There’s no need to fudge truths or water-down the complexities of the subject, given the clarity and simplicity of the story. In 2003, in the lead-up to the Invasion of Iraq, Gun — working for British intelligence — receives a secret memo from the NSA asking English operatives to uncover any information that could be used to blackmail UN diplomats into voting for an American invasion. Feeling a crisis of conscience, she leaks it immediately; hoping, in a naïve way, that it could help stop an imminent, unjust, possibly illegal war.

Gavin Hood’s to-screen translation of this ‘based on a true story’ tale — written for the screen by he, Gregory Bernstein, and Sara Bernstein — is effectively a movie about chains of events. Or, if that doesn’t sound explosive enough for you, about chain reactions.

Its opening is small, domestic, singular; the story framed around Knightley’s workdays, the camera framed on Knightley’s face. But, once she makes her decision — printing out the email’s contents, popping it in the post — we move away from her, following its effects. We see the staff at The Observer, arguing over the veracity of the leak and the dangers of printing it. We bounce from journalist to journalist, secret source to secret source. Eventually, once the story is printed, and Knightley owns up to what she’s done, there’s Scotland Yard investigators, lawyers. Throughout, there’s real contemporaneous news reports.

This teeming cast of characters each has a job to do; Official Secrets a film that’s about people at work, in newsrooms, legal offices, intelligence agencies. If you took a drink for every time someone made a very important phone call, you’d be taken in for alcohol poisoning.

Hard at work, in turn, are a cast of top-shelf thespians, every tiny role filled with a known name, a familiar face, someone who can hit even a solitary scene out of the park. There’s Ralph Fiennes, Jeremy Northam, Rhys Ifans, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Indira Varma, Monica Dolan, Angus Wright, etc. The one given the plum role, of course, is Knightley. And, for an actor so often (deservedly) derided — her turn in A Dangerous Method is the worst — she is incredible, here; conveying internal crisis, contradictory emotions, currents of feeling through the precision of her expressions. The chief expression she employs is probably something we’ll call ‘defiant yet spooked’, and Knightley nails it; her turn a work of fantastic screen acting in which less suggests so much more.

Admiration for the performances in Official Secrets essentially speaks of the film itself. This is a movie to be admired, in both the adulatory and pejorative senses. It’s well made and excellently acted, an entertainment valourising an act of moral clarity and individual bravery. But it’s also very serious, rarely lyrical, and not particularly cinematic; a film so sober it can feel a little glowering. 

JUDY & PUNCH

★★★1/2

Mirrah Foulkes’ directorial debut, a riff on the domestic-violence-themed puppetry tale, is one of the most distinctive — and ridiculous — Australian films in years. At once grim fairytale, social satire, absurdist parable, and magic-realist tragicomedy, it’s a mixture of horror and hilarity that seems unexpectedly indebted to that Simpsons ‘Treehouse Of Horror’ tale that riffed on the Salem witch-trials and smalltown moral hypocrisy.

In a storybook Ye Olde village, local yokels have two forms of entertainment: puppet shows and public executions. Mr. Punch (Damon Herriman, local cinema’s #1 villain after his Nightingale performance) and his wife, Judy (Mia Wasikowska), have arrived in town to perform their puppet-show in front of the braying drunkards at the grimy pub, McDrinky’s. Mr Punch, himself, proves to be a nasty, vituperative drunk, and a traditional trope of the Punch & Judy show — Punch hitting his wife with a big black stick — is repurposed, here, as act of horrifying violence. Judy is left for dead in the woods, where she discovers a community of outcasts, hatches a plot for revenge, and foments a feminist uprising.

In her revisionist Punch & Judy spin, Foulkes is undertaking a study of violence, in both cultural and pop-cultural forms. Here, violence is form of domestic oppression and tool of righteous rebellion. But it’s also entertainment, both in the puppet show within, and in cinema itself. At its beginning, the film’s title banner is laid over a shot — a frontal tableaux — of the crowd gathered to see Punch & Judy perform; at its end, as the credits roll, we see vintage newsreels of real-life children watching the puppets, often in horror.

Though it’s set in storybook yore, Judy & Punch is very much about the contemporary (and extremely online) climate, interrogating violent entertainments, morality policing, and angry-mob justice. It’s all this whilst remaining funny, fun, and genuinely silly; this anything but your standard Australian arthouse fare.