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Official Secrets review: Iraq-war whistleblower tale that’s more dossier than drama

Kiera Knightly plays a Government Communications Headquarters translator Katherine Gun - PA
Kiera Knightly plays a Government Communications Headquarters translator Katherine Gun - PA

15 cert, 112 min. Dir: Gavin Hood. Starring: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, Rhys Ifans, Indira Varma, Conleth Hill, Adam Bakri, Hattie Morahan, Monica Dolan, Tamsin Greig

The British docudrama Official Secrets takes us back to those contentious days in early 2003, when Tony Blair was pushing for a second UN resolution on Iraq and then going ahead without one. Caught up in the midst of all this was Katharine Gun, the GCHQ translator who notoriously blew the whistle on warmongering surveillance operations by the NSA, by leaking a top-secret memo to the press.

Keira Knightley plays her, in a tamped down, ruthlessly sensible performance with few flourishes and no false notes. Gavin Hood, the director, previously gave us two hot-button thrillers about modern war and politics – 2007’s Rendition and 2015’s fictional (and better) Eye in the Sky – but here he keeps his head down, and rather too much so.

This one is often more dossier than drama, and clutters the room with sketchy minor characters whose main job is to interject plot points. It’s dry, almost unashamedly pedestrian, and illuminates less than you’d hope, even on the basic level of what working for intelligence services at the time might have felt like.

After Gun has made her nervy decision to print off and post the NSA memo, she has little to do in this account but wait for reprisals, fearful of the implications for her husband Yasar (Adam Bakri), a Kurdish Turk of uncertain legal status. Meanwhile, the memo falls into the hands of Martin Bright (an eager-beaver Matt Smith), the Observer journalist who broke the story, after convincing the paper’s then editor Roger Alton (a droll Conleth Hill) that their pro-Iraq stance needed challenging.

It’s par for the course that the Observer scenes have a tinny, reductive flavour: the very first one has Rhys Ifans, as leather-jacketed lone wolf Ed Vulliamy, shouting out a default diatribe about them reproducing Blair’s press releases as fact. Still, the moment when they realise an overzealous sub has corrected the memo’s US spellings for print, thereby making their scoop look like an embarrassing fake, elicits a definite wince, even after all these years.

The back end of the film details Gun’s defence, by the legal-rights organisation Liberty, with Ralph Fiennes as tufty-haired QC Ben Emmerson advancing the argument that the war’s overall legality, at the moment the memo was leaked, should determine whether her leak was justified.

These scenes, stuffily office-bound like all the rest, aren’t sculpted well enough to earn their screen time. Meanwhile, the film drafts in many of its best actors – Hattie Morahan, Tamsin Greig, Jeremy Northam – in unrewarding cameos that barely let them do anything beyond convey the basic essence of Yvonne Ridley, Elizabeth Wilmshurst and Ken Macdonald respectively.

Official Secrets does its baseline job if you needed the story of Katharine Gun retold and vaguely dramatised, but it’s dreary entertainment.