THE WHISTLEBLOWER
Directed by Larysa Kondracki
Produced by Christina Piovesan & Celine Rattray
Written by Kondracki & Eilis Kirwan
Released by Samuel Goldwyn Films
Canada/Germany. 118 min. Rated R
With Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Anna Anissimova, Roxana Condurache, Monica Bellucci, Vanessa Redgrave, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Hewlett & Liam Cunningham
 

Kathryn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz), a tough, ambitious Nebraska cop, keeps getting turned down for promotions or a transfer near where her ex-husband lives; he has custody of their daughter. So when her boss shows her a recruitment brochure in 1999 for a United Nations peacekeeping contractor, she takes a well-paying temp job in Bosnia. With her Croatian heritage, she’s even idealistic about bringing law and order to the post-war chaos. Once on the job, she insists on setting an example of objective police work by bringing a domestic violence case against a Muslim husband, even as the locals she’s supposed to be training snicker that the wife “deserves it.” Head of the women’s rights and gender unit, Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave), is so impressed when the man’s found guilty, the first such conviction since the end of the war, that she offers Bolkovac a position, albeit a vaguely defined one within the intersection of the U.N. peacekeepers, their contractors, nonprofit agencies, and the local government. (How much official peacekeeping has been privatized with little supervision is a sub-theme.)

Bolkovac just sees herself as a cop doing her job when she finds brutally beaten women and tracks them back to a bar that turns out to be more than just a strip joint. She sees horrible evidence—cages, chains, passports locked in safes—that supports the claim of a girl in an overcrowded women’s shelter that the women there are “slaves, not prostitutes.” Disturbingly, photos of the bruised women show them in the company of her U.N. colleagues. The international casting of Bolkovac’s colleagues is particularly effective in emphasizing the evil that lurks behind benign faces. Brit Benedict Cumberbatch, Irishman Liam Cunningham, Canadian David Hewlett, and American David Strathairn frequently play such nice guys that revelations of their characters’ criminality are that much more nauseating.

Once Bolkovac’s focus shifts to the Serbian gangsters running the bar, there is no limit to the depths we see in how they control the women and protect their profits. Serbians are now as familiar and convenient as movie villains, like Nazis or Cold War Russians, so their bestiality loses its, well, punch, to be shocking, but the script is careful to not paint a single ethnic group or one agency as bad. Bolkovac mentors a local cop, who first bonds with her over the domestic violence case (the victim was “like my mother”) and helps her despite great personal risk.

Only in an after note are we told that Bolkovac brought a victorious case against her employers for wrongful dismissal. (She wrote a book about her experiences timed for release with the film.) For a change, the happy ending love story isn’t a fictional imposition. (Hunky Danish actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays the Dutch colleague she met in Bosnia and eventually married.) While there have been a couple of fictional depictions of individuals trying to help women caught in this awful system, such as in Christian Duguay’s miniseries Human Trafficking (2005), The Whistleblower is thrilling when it maintains damning focus on a real woman’s revelations about the deep involvement of U.N. personnel and their contractors, and her defiant determination against great odds. Nora Lee Mandel
August 5, 2011