In the lineage of real-life David-and-Goliath movies in which intrepid seekers of the truth investigate malfeasance in high places, “The Whistleblower” deserves an honorable mention. This earnest film may not be as dramatically coherent or as gripping as “Serpico,” “All the President’s Men,” “Erin Brockovich” and “Silkwood,” to name four much-decorated Hollywood prototypes. But its revelations are, if anything, more devastating and far more immediate than the dirty deeds uncovered in those predecessors.
Cary Fukunaga/Samuel Goldwyn Films
Vanessa Redgrave, who has a cameo role in the film.
The directorial debut of the Canadian filmmaker Larysa Kondracki, this grueling exposé of human trafficking in postwar Bosnia teeters in an uneasy balance between quasi-documentary and fiction. Its most sickening moment shows the rape and torture of a rebellious young prostitute smuggled from Ukraine into a Bosnian backwoods brothel while other young “whores of war,” as one character dismisses human trafficking victims, are forced to watch.
But for all its high-mindedness, “The Whistleblower,” filmed largely in Romania, has a choppy, fumbling screenplay (by Ms. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan) that lurches between shrill editorializing and vagueness while sorting through more characters than it can comfortably handle or even readily identify.
As Kathryn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz), the movie’s slingshot-toting American heroine, marches into a political minefield, she seems strangely immune to danger until near the end of the film. “The Whistleblower” ultimately fizzles by withholding any cathartic sense that justice was done, or ever will be done, once Kathryn spills the beans to the British news media.
When the story begins, she is a police officer and a divorced mother living in Lincoln, Neb. Prevented from transferring to Atlanta to be nearer to her daughter, she impulsively accepts a lucrative job as a United Nations peacekeeping officer in Bosnia in 1999. The blunt, fearless Kathryn embraces her new job with a gusto that immediately raises eyebrows among her cynical co-workers, who look down at the Eastern Europeans they have been charged to help.
Ms. Weisz’s feisty performance is the strongest element of “The Whistleblower.” She imbues Kathryn with the same stubborn-verging-on-fanatical zeal that Rose Byrne (whom Ms. Weisz physically resembles) brings to her character, Ellen Parsons, in the television series “Damages,” with which “The Whistleblower” shares a strain of paranoia.
After demonstrating her mettle in prosecuting a case of domestic violence, Kathryn is offered a job in the United Nations Gender Affairs Office, working with the police to investigate rape, domestic abuse and sex trafficking. Her gumption earns her the admiration of Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave, in a cameo), the head of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, who remains an enigmatic, undeveloped character. The party-loving Kathryn also begins a casual affair with Jan (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a fellow peacekeeping officer.
Kathryn comes face to face with the truth when she journeys to a bar in the countryside, where she discovers a nest of imprisoned young prostitutes who are so frightened that they refuse to talk to her. When she reports back to her smirking boss, Fred Murray (David Hewlett), and he mockingly asks her if she’s “going Columbo,” she realizes that he is part of a conspiracy of silence among her male co-workers. Even Laura Leviani (Monica Bellucci), the chilly head of the repatriation program, is of no help: she insists that bureaucratic rules leave her unable to rescue prostitutes whose passports have been confiscated by their kidnappers.
As Kathryn gathers evidence, including Abu Ghraib-like snapshots of the girls and their johns, a fuller picture begins to emerge of a lucrative, far-reaching operation involving the police and United Nations peacekeepers, many of them protected by diplomatic immunity. The more noise she makes to United Nations higher-ups, the more apparent it becomes that she is viewed as a troublemaking nuisance, and her job is terminated.
The movie concentrates on Kathryn’s efforts to coax two terrified Ukrainian girls, Raya (Roxana Condurache) and her best friend, Irka (Rayisa Kondracki, the director’s sister), to identify their kidnappers. Kathryn recklessly promises Raya protection if she agrees to talk, with dire consequences. Near the end of “The Whistleblower,” a scene is awkwardly inserted in which Raya’s mother discovers that immediate family members sold her daughter into slavery.
Kathryn is so outraged by her discoveries that she has no room for panic. Her lack of caution suggests that only someone blindly immune to intimidation would rattle so many cages without fearing for her life. Some of the horrors in the book Ms. Bolkovac wrote about her experiences, including the fact that many of the trafficked girls were much younger than those shown in the movie, are softened.
Kathryn’s only ally is Peter Ward (David Strathairn, in ominously brooding, conspiratorial mode), an internal affairs specialist who, in the film’s most suspenseful scene, helps her smuggle evidence out of her office.
“The Whistleblower” tells a story so repellent that it is almost beyond belief. Its conclusion — that in the moral quagmire of war and its aftermath, human trafficking and corruption are collateral damage — is unutterably depressing.
“The Whistleblower” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has a graphic rape, brutalization and strong language.
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