If you’re a screenplay writer, and you have to submit your final script the next morning, Official Secrets is the script you want to have to write. As a friend from college used to say, “the paper practically writes itself.” The cultural urgency and story stakes are self explanatory and built in. There’s 20ish characters involved, so choose 3 to focus, on, and pick the easiest to write parts of the story to extract tension from. Any novice screenwriter could put together a C+ screenplay; this movie’s is better than a C+, but it’s not quite an A.
Official Secrets gets its name from the British Espionage Act, which states you can’t leak state secrets under any circumstances, even if the UK government is complicit in a lie. Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) tests the power of this law. Frustrated with the UK and US partnering up to extort Iraq War votes from the UN Security Council, Gun leaks the official memo to an anti-war friend. That memo finds its way to the Observer’s Martin Bright (Matt Smith), who goes on an investigation to legitimize the claim made in the memo. Gun eventually gets found out. With the government going after her and her immigrant husband Yasar (Adam Bakri), Katharine seeks legal counsel from Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), a lawyer specializing in noble dissidents, conscientious objectors, if you will.
As a story worth telling, few are more noble than this one. The screenplay focuses on 3 characters easy to root for: Katharine, Martin, and Ben. Each of them chooses to act against seemingly insurmountable systemic power because to do so is right. Their crusade is often exceedingly difficult with problems layered upon problems to solve, like trying to formulate a legal defense when your husband unexpectedly gets deported for no reason whatsoever other than to bully you, or having your career story get derailed because of an editor who spell check’s a quote incorrectly. Many times with these stories, like Citizenfour for example, the whistleblowers get silenced and end up in a Kafkaesque nightmare by doing what is right. Official Secrets gives hope to that even though the deck might be stacked against you, there’s also layers of hope and help on the good side. Martin, for example, refers Katharine to Ben Emmerson, when it’s clear she had no idea where to go for legal defense. No, life will never be the same for any of these people after this affair, but Official Secrets posits that you can come out of this incident without complete life upheaval. Most importantly, to the audience, it shows that life upheaval doesn’t matter to these characters, the best humanity has to offer: they just care about doing what is right.
Official Secrets’s biggest mistake appears to be choosing the wrong medium. The vast scope of the story would have worked better as a miniseries of some kind, akin to David Simon’s The Wire. There’s 3 stories going on, all equally compelling and deserving more screentime: Katherine’s noble act of espionage and the hunt for her, The Observer’s inner workings as a result of this bombshell of a leak, and the trial of Katharine gun, and the key contributors. Official Secrets gives us all 3 storylines crammed into one. When you have that much material to work with, you streamline the story and make it completely driven by plot. That move is probably best, keeping the story moving and ending at a reasonable clip. However, character development is comprised as a result. I’d love to know more about Katharine’s backstory with her Kurdish immigrant husband; sounds fascinating. Or learn ANYTHING about Ben Emmerson other than he likes to fish and used to work inside the government. The characters in Official secrets are merely asked to do what the story demands of them, lessening the emotional blows the story wants to deliver and making it not quite All the President’s Men, the standard bearer for this type of film.
I don’t care that Official Secrets checks all the Oscar boxes. Or that it can get a tad too preachy in order to drive its point home. One of the characters says at one point “It is a damn good story.” Sometimes that’s enough, like with Official Secrets. And to all those whistleblowers out there, I thank you for your courage, and look forward to your stories being told. Who knows, maybe you’ll get Keira Knightley to play you, or even Lord Voldemort! I mean, Ralph Fiennes.