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The Whistleblower springs to mind a plethora of Seventies-era ripped-from-the-headlines dramas. Unfortunately it never rises to the level of All the President’s Men, but it offers up a performance from Rachel Weisz that is bruised, subtle, and full of naked rage.
Weisz’s performance is allowed one tragic scene in which to express white-hot rage, in a screaming cry against the corruptive powers that have enclosed around her and the lambs-to-the-slaughter girls trapped in the human trafficking living nightmare. Her tears of rage and pain are indelibly effective, but the movie that surrounds them is hopelessly bleak and unfocused. She starts the film as a stubborn single-minded officer trying to enact change and turns into something of an obsessive trying to perform a divine mission. There seems to be little thought about the possibility that she could lose her life, her job, or inadvertently get these girls killed.
The effort to humanize these poor girls, dismissed as “whores of war” by the group-think riddled male UN officers, is commendable, but it never fully materializes. What does is an obvious deficiency by first-time director who tries to juggle more characters and storylines then they are capable of effectively doing so. Vanessa Redgrave and Monica Bellucci are essentially glorified cameos, standing in as a wise, sage-like advisor and a by-the-books bureaucratic road-block respectively. And the men in the movie all blur into one large leering, threatening hive.
The Whistleblower works best if you think about it as a taunt, tense-thriller. It never quite shakes the feeling that it is editorializing, sermonizing, possibly even dipping into sensationalizing the truth by blunting some edges and removing some of the sting of the truth. (All of these girls appear to be near or over 18, which isn’t the truth. Depressing, gut-churning, repellent – but true.) In the end the only two things that truly stand out are Weisz’s masterful performance, and the conclusion that the ethical and moral wasteland leftover from war creates and sustains an atmosphere in which sex slavery and corruption are built in and self-sustaining.
