An exposé of rampant corporate corruption in military affairs, The Whistleblower arrives in theatres stamped with a self-important seal of approval. The issue-film begins with a cautionary prologue. Rebellious Ukrainian teenager Raya (Roxana Condurache) arrives home late one night from a party and bickers with her single-parent mother. With a friend by her side, Raya subsequently acquires a false passport, and in a flash, her fate is determined. Debut director and Balkan tour guide Larysa Kondracki sets forth our introductory excursion into the low-life of underground sex-slave trafficking.
Meanwhile Nebraskan police officer and caring, albeit distracted, and divorced mother Kathryn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz) struggles to pay the bills. Offered a drastic increase in salary, Kathryn leaves her rural post for a United Nations-contracted, privately-owned "peacekeeping" corporation occupying postwar Bosnia. She travels halfway across the world only to discover that outside the cornfields of America systemic female subjugation is still as prevalent as ever (and even propagated by United Nations employees).
After raiding a brothel, Kathryn watches local forces handcuff the formidable owners as they are quickly whisked away into motorcars and re-routed to unidentified locations. Enjoying a new promotion, she does not make much of an effort to apprehend and charge the traffickers under international law, naively assuming no foul play. However the bewildered Kathryn, driven by punctilious suspicion and professionalism, scours the brothel's backrooms, flashlight in hand. The place is replete with infested cots, rusted manacles, and mounds of used condoms. Kathryn recognizes colleagues gloating in perverse pictures plastered on the walls, orgiastic male "humanitarians" forcibly enacting communal rape and branding.
The Whistleblower has the inherent potency of a top-notch political conspiracy thriller. Kathryn is cornered in an international web of crooked policy and corporate corruption. Placing her job, diplomatic standing, and life on the line for the sake of 'serving and protecting' the disenfranchised, Kathryn confides in Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave), the head of the Women's Rights and Gender Unit. Rees introduces Kathryn to Internal Affairs officer Peter Ward, the always adept (but in this case underused) David Strathairn. Whenever Strathairn and Redgrave share the frame with Weisz, we are treated to a Master Class in acting; and for this reason alone, The Whistleblower may fleetingly be worth your time.
Crosscutting Kathryn and Raya throughout, the film is at its most riveting when Kathryn makes a last attempt to save the blonde Ukrainian teenager from the threshold of her captors. In a raid spearheaded by the tenacious protagonist, petrified Raya is literally caught between choosing her muckraking savior and brainwashing enslaver. In protestation Karthryn shrieks, "Don't look at him!" And a torn Raya, nearly catatonic, must choose. The finely directed climax captures the psychologically twisted shackles under which these victimized girls live: entrapped by fear, inferiority, and resignation.
Director Larysa Kondracki nevertheless proves to be a novice screenwriter, right down to her all-too-revealing title. An accidental and poorly constructed fait accompli, the film's title diminishes and ultimately nullifies the narrative's suspense. Instead of treating us to a paranoid thriller about the blowback of 'crying wolf,' Kondracki presents a by-the-numbers procedural. The peril lies in whether Karthryn's courage can surmount the dangers of military corruption; or will she wind up discarded like the film's unfortunate chattels? The movie's title unfortunately reveals all.
In a recent interview, the real Karthryn Bolkovac divulged that her most debilitating paranoia occurred once she was stripped of diplomatic immunity, shipped to United Kingdom authorities, and had to await the outcome of her whistle-blowing tribunal. Family and friends feared for her safety. Eventually Kathryn won her voice, and her employer dropped its appeal (only to gain new contracts in Iraq), evidence that Kathryn's story is an illuminating treatise on the parasitic relationship between governing bodies and corporate contractors. Yet the film ends before we are treated to the revelatory hypocrisy, and Kathryn's Bosnian travails, which feel neither urgent nor unknown, are left to satisfy. The Whistleblower disappointingly labors as a rudimentary treatment on the underworld of sex-trafficking, and even more so, as a purported piece of suspense storytelling.
Post a Comment