Hood and his co-screenwriters Greg and Sara Bernstein blame the flub on an overeager copy editor who ran the thing through spellcheck which changed “favorable” and “recognize” to their British spellings, causing the Drudge Report to declare the thing a fake. How Putin of them!Īs history reminds, her efforts - and those of the muckrakers at the London Observer who published said memo on right next to the story about the capture of the 9/11 mastermind in PAKISTAN! - were in vain. Bush and company’s plans to seek dirt on members of the United Nations Security Council in hopes of blackmailing them into voting for the U.S.-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. With a name like Gun, second only to Bond in British spy lore, you know her aim is true when she takes it upon herself - at great personal risk - to leak a top-secret memo about President George W. Boy, could we Yanks use a person like her right now! On the other hand, if your moniker is Katharine Gun, call all the relatives and promise them a heroic, albeit bland, depiction of a peon in the British military-industrial complex who dared spoil her superiors’ war party by speaking truth to power. You will not be favorably portrayed, despite appearing as yourselves via dozens of damning archival clips proving the lot of you to be either blatant lairs or gross incompetents. If your name is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell or Blair, you’ll definitely want to stay away.
Such is the fate of the whistle-blowing drama “Official Secrets.” Overwrought, overacted and utterly devoid of subtlety, Gavin Hood’s account of Britain’s version of Daniel Ellsberg is at once anger-inducing and somnambulant, a thrilling snooze about a valiant British woman’s failed attempt to prevent the deaths of more than 100,000 innocents at the hands of American and British troops sent to Iraq on a phony premise of weapons of mass destruction. Some stories are so compelling, even a trio of screenwriters can’t completely screw it up.
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