Official Secrets

I had the chance to see Official Secrets at Sundance this year and it was one of my favorites of the festival.  I decided to see it again last night now that it is in wide release and, once again, I thought it was a taut and suspenseful political thriller.  It tells the true story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a translator at GCHQ (a British intelligence gathering agency) who leaks a top-secret memo from Frank Koza of the NSA asking for intelligence which could be used to blackmail smaller countries into voting for a U.N. resolution supporting the invasion of Iraq to the press in 2003.  Once the story is published in The Observer, she confesses and is charged with violating the Official Secrets Act.  She pleads not guilty and her lawyers argue that she acted to prevent the imminent loss of life from an illegal war, a defense which could potentially be embarrassing for the British government.  I found the story to be both fascinating and compelling because it profiles an ordinary woman willing to face extraordinary consequences in order to follow her conscience.  Knightley gives an absolutely riveting performance, especially in a powerful interrogation scene where she tells investigators that she doesn't work for the British government but for the British people who are being lied to by the government.  The movie also features an impressive all-star cast including Matt Smith, Matthew Goode, and Rhys Ifans as the reporters who break the story, Ralph Fiennes as a defense lawyer, and Jeremy Northam as a Crown prosecutor.  The movie is fraught with tension (even on a second viewing), particularly during a sequence surrounding the deportation of Gun's husband in retaliation for her actions.  I enjoyed this movie (again) and I recommend it highly.