Review of Page Eight (2011) by Edith N — 27 Feb 2013

At Least the Cast Is Impressive.

I became convinced partway through this that the character whose death was one of the underlying issues to this film was in fact based on a Greener--one of the ones who doesn't count as a famous alumnus because she hadn't graduated. Instead, she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip while acting as a human shield. Her case is considerably less clear cut than the one here, wherein the character is eventually found to have been shot while waving a white flag. I do not believe we are ever going to find an Israeli document which states, "No, the bulldozer driver could totally see her and ran her down on purpose." However, it was a case of someone young and idealistic who went to a Palestinian territory to prevent the Israeli authorities from doing something that they considered unjust. I phrase it this vaguely because I honestly can't remember what the character in the movie was trying to accomplish.

Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy, not to be confused with Bill Nye) works for MI5. His direct superior, also his former college tutor, is Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon). Ben has produced a report that details a program of torture under the direction of the US in secret prisons around the world. On page eight, it declares that the Prime Minister, Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes), knew all about it. This is, needless to say, a bit controversial. Meanwhile, Johnny meets his neighbour, Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz, who wasn't in [i]Harry Potter[/i]). She has clearly engineered the meeting. Her brother is the one who was killed in Palestine, and she obviously believes that Johnny can somehow find out what actually happened, which he does. However, that doesn't just mean he can give away the information, especially given that Ben dies and Johnny's new superior, Jill Tankard (Judy Davis), doesn't like him. And there is the matter of the Prime Minister, which is a bit more important anyway.

Before you can ask, of course Johnny falls for Nancy. He says he has had fewer than five wives, which presumably means four. If I understand what was going on correctly--I'm not certain--Ben's wife Emma (Alice Krige) used to be married to Johnny and is the mother of his daughter, Julianne (Felicity Jones). It's implied that this is largely because Ben has always been better at leaving his work home than Johnny is. It is also true that screenwriters seem to have a hard time imagining an equal, sharing relationship between a man and a woman that doesn't involve sex. Frustrating, but there it is. This is why you'd probably never see the story with a young man trying to pump a middle-aged woman working for an intelligence agency for what happened to someone; they can generally only conceive of a sexual relationship between an older woman and a younger man as a joke. I will admit that, given the opportunity, I can see just about anyone going for the relationship with Rachel Weisz, but still.

To be honest, I believe that the real nature of intelligence agencies is confusing to the outsider, which makes this somewhat true to life in that sense. I didn't know what was going on half the time, but I believe that to be realistic. I don't know MI5's rules about informants and don't have to. I feel we can be reasonably sure that half of what happens is illegal, but only reasonably so. And if Johnny doesn't want people to know that he works for MI5, he must have some kind of cover occupation that he normally tells people, right? I mean, how did Nancy know what he did for a living in the first place? She supposedly knows early enough so that she can engineer that first meeting, but how? I don't expect her to require security clearance to live in the same building with Johnny, but she's supposedly been living there for a year. Shouldn't the fact that she's asking Tough Questions have been brought to someone's attention before?

The film does mention the irony that, fifteen years ago, it was reasonable of intelligence people to be wondering what their careers would be from here on out. For obvious reasons, we dwell a bit more on the London bombings than 9/11--Ben and Johnny might have been expected to help stop the London bombings, after all--but there is still that minor bewilderment about the similarities and differences between a Cold War world and one where the enemy has no home state, surely making it a harder enemy to spy on. There are rumours that they want to make a series of these movies, and I have to say, I wouldn't watch any others. If they really delved into some of the issues they raise, that would be worth watching, but they don't. They present them and move on, and we're supposed to gather some kind of plot on our own by reading between the lines. Or perhaps the plot is really the relationship between Johnny and Nancy. I still think the last minutes of the movie are ridiculous and implausible, which kill any momentum it had before then.