Review of The Whistleblower (2010) by Parker M — 12 Aug 2011

2 Stars out of 4.

There is something to be said about great performances, and especially ones that cannot fulfill the dreary dullness of its film. The Whistleblower is an example of this curiosity, where it takes a venerable actress and dips her in material that doesn't commit like she does. Too bad; it's a fascinating story that demands a voice in public discourse.

The Whistleblower takes a vast, extremely unpleasant subject - human trafficking - and thrusts it into a narrative that could have been written by John Grisham or Robert Ludlum. In addition, I think The Whistleblower would've been better off being directed by Michael Mann, or considering the gender of the character, Kathryn Bigelow.

Instead, The Whistleblower is completed by debut director Larysa Kondracki and based on the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, here played by the very talented Rachel Weisz. Back home, Kathryn is a divorced police officer, a full-fledged workaholic who can barely find time for her daughter, who lives with the father. Kathryn is sent to Bosnia on a peacekeeping mission, where she discovers direct evidence that members of the UN and US military contractors are responsible for surreptitiously regulating a sex trafficking ring. Here, women are abducted and forced to carry out their "debts", which are unredeemable because they don't actually exist.

Kathryn pries, but her superiors deny the evidence, asserting that no UN official can be charged internationally. Kathryn targets DynCorp, an American private security organization that - we eventually learn - is still employed by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also aided Louisiana after Katrina. The Whistleblower, however, is situated in 2004, the post-war times in Bosnia where sex trafficking skyrocketed because the male population greatly diminished.

Kathryn learns of this coverup like a worm digging below its wormhole. Kathryn was prowling in dark depths to uncover this information, the kind that exposed the weak spots and reduced the legitimacy of the powerful, prestigious global organization she was working for. Kathryn had to fight the system. She could not get to the corrupt contractors without first smoking out the sex trafficking kings. Also, she couldn't repatriate the young sex slaves because, according to bureaucrat Laura Levin (Monica Bellucci), they did not have passports. By the end, Kathryn may have brought retribution but it is clear the law remains an unfair game of poker. Kathryn's intentions were high, but the results didn't necessarily reflect her efforts.

I also feel the same way about Kondracki's direction. Her style is morose, but the material is hardly pushed into that territory. To me, Kondracki's narrative lacks humanity, in which we are neither coaxed into sympathizing for these unfortunate young women nor are we thrusted into Kathryn's conundrum. Therefore, The Whistleblower never veers into the human, palpitating thriller it needs to be. Kondracki claimed in an interview that she did this to avoid preachiness, but without strong pacing her film becomes a sermon.

Weisz is effective as Kathryn Bolkovac, embodying the role with ferocious subtlety and a gnashing nerve for the truth. However, Weisz smartly curbs her character with a naive idealism, in which she constantly assumes the world is a moral place. When she discovers the awful truth about some of the ongoings in the UN, she strives to justify the unjustifiable. Kathryn was a hero, I think, but she was driven by tragic idealisms, ones that saw the world as only round and without its bumps.

The Whistleblower states that our security could be our greatest enemy, but Kondracki never makes for an alarming case. This is as basic as thrillers come, which is frustrating due to Weisz's resilience here, a performance that persists in finding complexities in a simplistically laden script.

The Whistleblower reminded me mostly of All The President's Men, how it dealt with the uncovering of a scandal rather than its covering. In The Whistleblower, David Strathairn plays Peter Ward, a member of Internal Affairs who resembles the Deep Throat of Watergate in All The President's Men. So I found interesting comparisons in The Whistleblower, and there is no doubt Kondracki wants to create something inspired. But all it transcends is a performance and that's not Konracki's. Her efforts are didactic, but that's part of the problem. The Whistleblower is a point A to B thriller without the thrills, and surely Kathryn had some.