“The Whistleblower” is director Larysa Kondracki’s gripping based-on-a-true story debut and star Rachel Weisz delivers a riveting performance. Although the movie is slow to get started and a bit jumbled in places, it ultimately reminds us that there are always people who exploit the weak and innocent and others who turn a blind eye. The movie is constructed as a relentless thriller and Weisz gives one of her best performances, portraying Bolkovac as an intensely thorough investigator who has heroism thrust upon her by the circumstances in which she finds herself. David Strathairn co-stars as Peter Ward, one of Bolkovac’s few trustworthy colleagues and Vanessa Redgrave is Madeleine Rees, a real-life official of the Human Rights Commission, who offers Bolkovac moral support. In 1999, Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac (Weisz) joins a private security company doing peacekeeping duties in Bosnia. Bolkovac thinks the peacekeepers are going to be a consortium of elite police officers, but she discovers they more closely resemble criminals with guns and diplomatic immunity. As her investigation into sex trafficking deepens, we see the true ugliness of what she’s uncovering as she gathers evidence that implicate the peacekeepers as well as their superiors. That the UN was aware of what was going on and did nothing is unbelievable.
The script, written by Kondracki and Ellis Kirwan, based on a book written by Bolkovac, is designed to make you think and to elicit outrage. The American private security firm, DynCorp International, whose operatives committed these crimes and tried to cover them up, is still employed by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and was used in Louisiana after Katrina. Although “The Whistleblower” is a fictional film, the facts were supported by a British labor tribunal that investigated Bolkovac’s claim against DynCorp. Unfortunately, Bolkovac was fired and has not been able to find a job in the international community. “The Whistleblower” captures the obscene violence of sex trafficking and keeps you on edge in this harrowing thriller. 8/11/11
1 comment:
I would almost call this film a docu-drama. Slavery and forced prostitution is prevelent every- where that there are men of greed who use brute force to have their way. According to this story Americans are just as bad as the rest of the world.
Bravo to Rachel Weisz for her fine performance!
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