smh.com.au
October 1, 2011
Cop this ... Rachel Weisz as UN observer Kathryn Bolkovac in a role based on a true story. The confronting world of sex trafficking is brought out of the shadows, writes PAUL BYRNES
Rachel Weisz is often the best thing about her movies and that's true of The Whistleblower, a crusading drama clothed as a thriller. Weisz has the capacity to submerge her sense of self in a way that few actors do. Most of the time we pay to see actors become bigger than themselves, playing the kind of person we dream of being - superhero, supermum, superstud. Weisz sometimes does those roles, too, but she is better playing ''ordinary women''. Of course, there's no such thing but her characters seem like someone who might sit opposite you in the train - if you were lucky.
She's also drawn to causes. There is a reforming agenda behind many of the stories she picks, some great crime that needs addressing. That's certainly true of The Whistleblower, based on a shocking true story about sex trafficking in Bosnia. The film has a great cast, with Vanessa Redgrave and David Strathairn in key supporting roles. It would have needed all of this actor power to get made, as the subject matter is so confronting.
The publicity stresses a connection to the great political thrillers of the 1970s without naming which ones but I'm guessing films such as All the President's Men and maybe Julia, given Redgrave's presence. Back then it was easier to get films such as these made. Audiences were more adventurous, money flowed. Studios now are conservative, partly because of tougher times. This movie has been put together by smaller companies and seed money from Telefilm Canada (director Larysa Kondracki is Canadian and this is her first feature).
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I'm reluctant to criticise it. There are few films about human trafficking; fewer still based on moving true stories. An end title quotes an estimate of 2.5 million people being trafficked globally without giving a source. I don't know if that's true. I have researched some of this story and the facts are pretty close. If anything, the real story was worse. That makes the film relevant and for some people, that will be enough. Others, me included, look for more. I've never believed it is enough for a film to have its heart in the right place; I want it to grab me by another part of the anatomy, like the two films mentioned above.I think Kondracki believes in the same thing; she just doesn't do it as well as is necessary, partly because the script tries to cover too many points of emotion. She and co-writer Eilis Kirwan researched this topic for years. They have a lot to say and no one telling them not to say it all. Thus the film has about four endings as bits are tied up and conclusions are reached. It's partly a fear we won't get it; sometimes that comes from lack of confidence in one's own storytelling.
The film is based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Lincoln, Nebraska, who went to Bosnia in the late 1990s as a United Nations observer. She was hired by an American corporation, DynCorp, although the name has been changed in the movie to Democra Security, presumably for legal reasons. Weisz plays Bolkovac, who takes a job with the UN's International Police Force because it pays $100,000 a year and she needs the money. Her former husband, who has custody of her children, is moving to Florida and she can't get a transfer.
The movie begins in Kiev, as two teenage girls contemplate their own plans for a quick score. Raya (Roxana Condurache) and Luba (Paula Schramm) think they're going to Romania to a job. By the time Bolkovac arrives in Bosnia, they are working as prostitutes in seedy bars that exist largely for the 20,000 international peacekeepers. Vanessa Redgrave, as Madeleine Rees from the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, puts Kathryn to work investigating battered and trafficked women. Strathairn comes to her aid as an Internal Affairs man when she discovers that her colleagues are involved in the trafficking.
The movie's best idea is to make Kathryn's discoveries slow and unpredictable, so she becomes a crusader reluctantly. The worst is that we can tell instantly by the casting whether someone will be a decent human being or a rat-fink scumbag. There are a lot of the latter and the movie gets into some dark places. It is awful to think this is true; a little reading on the internet makes clear it's worse than we see here.
Bolkovac wrote a book about her time working for DynCorp, a company worth $3 billion a year, most of it US government money. DynCorp is training much of the police forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Whistleblower is flawed in dramatic structure but its depiction of the activities of the fictional Democra Security is beyond alarming.
THE WHISTLEBLOWER
Directed by Larysa Kondracki
Rated MA, 112 minutes
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