The Whistleblower is no The Insider, and finally something for the 65+ set.
The Whistleblower
Silkwood, The Insider, The Informant! – the socially conscious thriller in which Working Stiff goes up against Big Boss can always fire a sense of outrage. Especially when the stiff is based on someone real. So why doesn’t The Whistleblower have the same impact? It should – Big Boss here is the United Nations, specifically peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and their involvement in sex trafficking. Are we so punch-drunk with revelations of corruption in high places that nothing surprises us any more? Maybe. But it’s also the way the story’s told, and here it’s done with such cool, flat efficiency that it’s thin on the movie moments needed to ignite that outrage.
By telling it straight, the film offers few surprises. The opening sequence establishes the trafficking up front, so the atmosphere is tense without suspense; only near the end is there a moment where something unpredictable happens. It’s also here that the first palpable sense of jeopardy is felt and the chills finally kick in. But even the ending lacks a clear sense of justice done: it seems short-changed by abruptness, with no savouring moment of triumph. A generous explanation might be that perhaps that’s the point: we’re meant to question if anything has changed or if the job really has been done.
There’s good capable work from Vanessa Redgrave and David Strathairn – and a miscast Monica Bellucci – in support of Rachel Weisz’s title character, Kathryn Bolkovac. A Nebraskan police officer, she takes on the high-paying UN job to secure a better future with her daughter. Weisz has played this David role before, against the Goliath of Big Pharma in The Constant Gardener, and she displays the necessary courage and driven assertiveness.
What’s missing in the script and performance, though, are moments of doubt and fear, and the little things Meryl Streep found in Karen Silkwood that gave her a distinct personality and vulnerability. Even the potential for resonance between her situation as a mother and that of the Ukrainian girls being trafficked is skated over.
Where the film does have impact, though, is in its treatment of the trafficking. First-time feature director Larysa Kondracki has achieved a disturbing authenticity in the scenes involving the girls. She may not have quite married the dramatic with the documentary elements of this story, but it’s in those scenes that, finally, some outrage is to be found.
THE WHISTLEBLOWER, directed by Larysa Kondracki. Cinemas and times here.
Yay – someone in this country has noticed there’s a 65+ audience out here, and has done something about it. Of course, it helps there was a 65+ cast of some of our most experienced troupers to draw on. In the smartly titled Rest for the Wicked, our hero, 65+ undercover cop Murray (Tony Barry), inserts himself as a resident of a flash retirement village. It’s his swan song: although retired, he plans to finally nobble his nemesis Frank (John Bach), who lives there. Deaths occur, suspicions – and other things – are aroused, but the nobbling proves elusive. And, in a nice twist, we find out why.
This isn’t your Agatha Christie murder-mystery. There’s only one suspect, Murray doesn’t engage in explication to the assembled, and it’s not exactly taut and suspenseful. And for what turns out to be a clever idea, the visual and narrative execution of the mystery could be much cleverer. That it’s not is more likely a reflection of the experience of the director and writer – this is their first feature – than a smoothing of the edges for the 65+ audience; that would have been insulting, given that in other aspects the film-makers have achieved their aims of honouring their actors and treating the issue of being old with respect.
Elder jokes are told from the elder point of view, whether it’s beeping pill dispensers or dialogue (“Nobody listens to you when you’re old”), and there’s an underlying poignant realism. Small and soft-centred, yes, but not a complete confection.
REST FOR THE WICKED, directed by Simon Pattison. Cinemas and times here.
Click here for more stories and reviews by Helene Wong; here for stories and reviews by David Larsen.