Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

“Official Secrets” might seem like a rather bland and generic title for a movie, but as it turns out there is a good reason for it: the United Kingdom’s Official Secrets Act of 1989, which one Katharine Gun was nearly charged of violating in 2004. She leaked a memo that proved the United States and British governments were lying about the legality of the Iraq War.

Gun is played here by Keira Knightley, in a rather unusual role for her: relatively contemporary (okay, fifteen years ago), playing a government agent, by some measures a spy. It’s a story, as directed by Gavin Hood — who brought us the surprisingly gripping and provocative Eye in the Sky in 2016 — filled with international intrigue, and, as they say, “based on true events.”

As a fictionalized account of a true story, however, Official Secrets transparently traffics in embellishments, relying on dramatization that feels suspect when considering whether things really played out the way they’re depicted. A near-miss with the government’s attempt to deport Gun’s Muslim immigrant husband Yasar (Adam Bakri), for example, where Katharine intercepts him just in time at the airport. It’s those kinds of shameless “Hollywood-izing” of the story that temps one to roll the eyes.

Storytelling contrivances notwithstanding, Official Secrets is strikingly engrossing for a movie that’s ultimately just about a leaked memo. With shades of All The President’s Men — complete with a character actually referencing “Deep Throat” — a copy of the document exchanges hands in an underground parking garage. Once the press runs with the information, Gavin Hood’s direction very effectively conveys the weight of risk Gun put herself in. Based on nothing more than her own integrity and principles, she put her own livelihood, her own marriage, ultimately the fate of her entire life on the line.

The gravity of her choices are easily felt, particularly at simple but fateful moments when Gun chooses to confess at her office rather than subject her colleagues to intimidating interrogations, or when she risks prison by deciding she’ll plead Not Guilty because she simply feels it’s the right thing to do.

Official Secrets features several other well-known British actors, almost to the point of distraction: Matt Smith as reporter Martin Bright; Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans as newsroom colleagues of wildly different demeanor; Ralph Fiennes as Katharine’s defense lawyer — who spends a little too much time just giving her admiring looks from opposite ends of tables. Fiennes is capable of both great acting and phoned-in acting, and here it’s the latter.

Luckily the same could not be said of the rest of the cast, who are generally convincing and engaging, especially Knightley, who usually feels much more at home in period costume dramas. And although she and her gorgeous husband are typical examples of regular people being played in movies by impossibly beautiful people, Knightley remains convincing as an otherwise average citizen who finds herself in extraordinary circumstances and still makes the difficult choice to do what’s right. This movie is quite clearly on her side, and rightly so.

It’s a fascinating exercise to observe the stories contextualized in world events of two decades past, and consider how they inform how the world got to where it is today. Official Secrets simultaneously references broadly dubious government lawmaking (and lawbreaking) and narrows it down to an individual level in a satisfyingly effective, if moderately contrived, way. Honestly, most people with any interest in being both illuminated and entertained by a movie about the consequences of government whistleblowing will not likely be compelled to nitpick about such things as plot contrivances. They’ll just plain enjoy this movie.

*Some things are quite literally on the nose.*

Overall: B+