Title: The Whistleblower

Opens: August 5, 2011

It takes a special kind of courage to be a whistleblower. You will probably be ostracized by your colleagues, you may be fired on a technicality, and you could even be killed. In a broad sense, Larysa Kondracki’s film, “The Whistleblower,” can be torn from today’s headlines. Sean Hoare, a journalist who blew the whistle on Rupert Murdock’s “News of the World” tabloid hackings, was found dead in his English country home in the midst of the crisis. Just a coincidence? Maybe. The police say it would take weeks to find a cause of death. Hmmm.

There’s another reason that people hesitate to blow the whistle on shenanigans. Imagine that you got yourself a job that paid $100,000 tax free for six months’ work and you discovered that the people you work with are involved with the very criminals they are supposed to expose. These circumstances actually occurred to one such well-paid diplomat, Kathryn Bolkovac, a newly-divorced woman on the Lincoln Nebraska police force denied a transfer to Georgia to be near her daughters, who were in the custody of her ex. Ready to quit the force, she is offered a job that few people want and wrote a book about her experience. The hardcover was published January 4th of this year and is available at Amazon for twenty-two bucks and in paperback for just over ten. This would be a most worthwhile investment as would your attendance at a screening of a film that is often heartbreaking, its tender sentiments contrasted with searing melodrama, and, most of all, an Oscar-worthy performance by Rachel Weisz in the role of Ms. Bolkovac. Her experience is yet another black mark on the U.S. in that Americans hired by a private contractor for the U.N. in Bosnia in 1999 not only looked the other way when confronted with graphic evidence of human sex-slave trafficking but actually participated in the “fun.”

Though one wonders what purely English-speaking Americans can do in working with the local police to investigate rape and sex trafficking, Bolkovac is made head of the Gender Office through her affiliation with Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave), who heads the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Soon enough, she learns that her fellow diplomats visit the whorehouses where the sex slaves are plying their trade, women as young as twelve who in Eastern European countries such as Ukraine are promised nice jobs as waitresses in Sarajevo with good pay. When they arrive, however, they are stripped of their passports, becoming people without a country at the mercy of goons who will stop at nothing to keep the cash rolling in from the johns. One girl, Raya (Roxana Cordurache) is even shot in the head by a local pimp for talking to the authorities. Raya stands in as a symbol of the abuses faced by these young women, a girl who trusts Kathy and whose mother is understandably eager to get her out of Bosnia. For her part, Kathy feels a particular obligation to the sex slaves, having said, “Young women confided in me about what they had experienced, putting themselves at great risk. I felt that if I could do nothing else, the least I could do was give them a voice.”

The heat rises steadily. The more Kathy learns and sees in this snake pit of corruption, the more she is willing to put herself at great risk to get documents and recordings out to the media, though one wonders whether her whistle blowing has accomplished anything at all to decrease the forced prostitution and defund the organization. She benefits from sober side roles:Vanessa Redgrave as her confidant and friend, David Strathairn as Peter Ward, who is investigating with the authority of Internal Affairs, Monica Bellucci as head of the repatriation program who cannot or does not want to do what it takes, David Hewlett as Fred Murray, her boss, intent on getting her fired.

Director Larysa Kondracki does not hold back, presenting gory scenes of maimed girls , but the success of this film rests on the shoulders of Rachel Weisz in the role of a woman who joined the U.N. group to save enough money to see her kids but gets wholly wrapped up in the fate of these Eastern European girls. Like Serpico, who had to flee to Switzerland after blowing the whistle on corrupt New York cops, Weisz’s character was forced to live outside the U.S., now residing in Holland. “The Whistleblower” was filmed in Romania—in Bucharest and the Transylvanian mountains.

Rated R. 114 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall: A-