Director: Larysa Kondracki
Screenplay: Larysa Kondracki, Eilis Kirwan
Producers: Amy Kaufman, Christina Piovesan, Celine Rattray
Starring: Rachel Weisz, Vanessa Redgrave, Monica Bellucci, David Strathairn, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
MPAA Rating: R
Running time: 112 min.

(4/5)

For months I’ve been hearing mumblings of Rachel Weisz’s performance in The Whistleblower. I knew there was likely something to the buzz; the film won the Phillip Borsos Award for Best Canadian film as well as the Audience Award at the Whistler Film Festival where it premiered in December and since then it has been gaining healthy buzz for Weisz as an Oscar contender.

Based on real events, Larysa Kondracki’s feature film debut stars Weisz as Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who takes a position with the UN International Police Force serving as a peace keeper in post-war Bosnia. She goes in with high hopes of helping the local police force rebuild the country after the devastation of war but what she finds is an old boys club unwilling to help the women of the country. When she intervenes and with the help of a young officer, gets justice for a woman who was beaten by her husband, she catches the attention of a humanitarian arm of the UN which specifically focuses on gender issues. When during a routine call she comes across two young women who are the victims of sex trafficking, Bolkovac sets off on a mission to find those responsible and what she uncovers is a web of UN officials responsible for the acquisition, trafficking and abuse of women.

It’s not a new story. Tales of individuals uncovering mass conspiracies are always turning up. What’s interesting about Kondracki’s film is that besides the victims who in this case and in general, happen to be women, a woman is also the hero of the story. But Bolkavac isn’t some do gooder who stands up to authority and gets things changed. She’s a real human being with flaws, most notably she’s an absentee mother, but she feels her work is important and does her best, against mountains of red tape, to right a severe wrong. That’s the other interesting aspect of The Whistleblower: it provides an inside look at the inner workings and politics of the UN and the difficulties involved when working with various countries.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that there is red tape, when political entities are involved that is to be expected but it all seems so simple from afar, when you don’t know the details of the people involved. Up close, the disregard for special circumstances seems heartless but is, none the less, a necessary evil. Aren’t all cases of human torture “special circumstances”? It’s only an aside to Bolkavac’s story but Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan’s script beautifully encapsulates and delivers that idea while staying impartial. They’re not condoning the methodology, just making it public so that outsiders, and perhaps even those inside, can see how inefficient it is.

The dark subject matter is accompanied by some horrific scenes – Kondracki doesn’t shy away from the atrocities but shows them with a careful balance of show and suggest – and some outstanding performances. Outside of Weisz who delivers a strong performance as a conflicted woman willing to go to extremes to uncover the truth, the film also features great performances from David Hewlett as a fellow officer involved in trafficking, David Strathairn as an Internal Affairs officer who seems to be in Bolkavac’s corner and Monica Bellucci as the head of the NGO and the enforcer of the rules that seem so inhumane.

It’s not an easy watch, these types of stories rarely are, but The Whistleblower tells an important story and manages to provide both the human and political side of the equation while never losing sight of the fact that this is the story of one woman who stood and fought against insurmountable forces.

The Whistleblower opens in limited release in the US today and in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on Friday, August 12th.