TIFF - The Whistleblower

Rating: ****

The Whistleblower may not be one of the most talked about films of the Toronto International Film Festival, but it is one of the 2010 Fest’s most compelling. Like a police procedural with an international flavour, the film has the added gravitas of being “ripped from the headlines,” a hook that’s both compelling and repellent. Additionally, The Whistleblower features a first rate performance by Academy Award-winner Rachel Weisz, whose positively brilliant as she trades between frustration and inspiration from beginning to end.

Weisz plays Kathy Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop that takes a job as a private police officer in post-war Bosnia. As one of the few female cops on the force, Bolkovac manages to make progress in small ways in the prosecution of domestic violence against women, a measure that gets her recognized by the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights (Vanessa Redgrave). Under her new responsibilities, Bolkovac finds herself neck deep in the murky world of human trafficking in Bosnia, which has tendrils leading from the pimps to the very people that Bolkovac is working with at the U.N.

This is not surprising, and there really is no mystery for Bolkovac to solve, but what makes The Whistleblower compelling is a matter covered by many stories in the past, how can one person make difference amidst a system hopelessly corrupt. Bolkovac makes a few allies, like an internal affairs officer played by David Strathairn, but despite their reach and high standing, they turn out to be as powerless as she is when it comes to exposing complicity with the local sex trade.

Because of its subject matter, The Whistleblower is difficult to watch for a couple of reasons. First there’s the obvious and depraved abuse of these young women, many of whom were sold into slavery by people they loved and trusted. Although the film is rarely explicit in its depiction of the abuse, there are some rather chilling things alluded to or implied. The other difficulty is the sheer wall of obfuscation that Bolkovac encounters. Whether it’s the fact of the collusion of her colleagues or the fact that they do it so brazenly and without consequence, you can’t help but feel that there’s no way one person can make a dent in all of this.

Still, as they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Bolkovac is an admirable character, determined and committed, but at the same time flawed. She took the job so that she might have enough money to spend more time with her kids, but in the process she’s given a position requiring more than a six month commitment. However, the film doesn’t dwell on Bolkovac’s difficulties as a mother connecting to her children, but perhaps how she used that longing and poured her heart and soul into helping these young women.

A gut-wrenching journey, The Whistleblower tests your patience and gives you hope. Anchored by some pretty solid performances from Weisz, Redgrave, and Strathairn, as well as character actors like Nikolaj Lie Kaas and David Hewlett, this is a compelling drama and highlights a frequently overlooked issue. First-time director Larysa Kondracki, who also co-wrote the screenplay, keeps a very tight grip on the material and delivers the story with precision and determination. Well made with a good message, The Whistleblower is a film that deserves to be known far and wide.

Law Abiding Citizen

Rating: **

It’s tough time out there, everybody wants revenge for something. So why gum up a perfectly good revenge thriller with atypical moral ambiguity that takes your film’s obvious hero and casts him as the Jigsaw-esque psycho, James Bond villain bad guy? Despite showing sporadic signs of life, Law Abiding Citizen swerves too often into oncoming traffic to grasp that it’s a film about the system screwing a deserving man out of justice, rather than a slick DA learning that winning isn’t everything, and then winning. The movie sports some serious credentials – directed by F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, The Italian Job) and starring Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx – but it ultimately falls in an null field between A-list ambitions and B-list status.

Abiding also tries to be hardcore, but finds that it too frequently pulls its punches. As the story gets going though you find that it’s basically Law & Order with pieces of other movies grafted on to create some kind of cyborg Law & Order episode with more fire power. To wit there’s a scene in the movie where a hillbilly thief is tipped off that the police are coming to see him. An ethereal voice on the other end of the phone (like in Eagle Eye) leads him to supposed safety. But it’s a trap (Saw). An elaborate trap (Saw II, III, IV, V, VI) as it turns out. And the thief is then taken to an abandoned warehouse where he’s carved up into numerous pieces by a masked assailant (Hostel). The killer now plays a mind games with cops from his jail cell (Silence of the Lambs) in order to get what he wants.

When I began breaking down the story thusly, I realized just how stagnant it really was. In the moment, Law Abiding Citizen can be enjoyable for its own merits, but once you start contemplating the ridiculousness of the plot, you begin to appreciate it for all it’s movie of the week grandstanding and cookie cutter characters. Foxx wears this worst of all because his DA character, Nick Rice, is such a tremendous example of human fertilizer it’s hard for you to care. He’s one of those career people that’s all game, on and off the clock. He skips his own daughter’s recital in order to view the execution of one of numerous scum bags he put away. So in predicable fashion we get the juxtaposition of the execution with the girl’s recital, and back and forth, back and forth. Oh, is it dramatic enough for you yet?

The executed scumbag dies horribly. Someone switched out one of the chemicals that causes a painless death and replaced it with something that causes a painful one. It doesn’t take the police long to find the suspect, but then he’s the aforementioned hillbilly that ends up butchered. Both men were part of a home invasion that killed the wife and daughter of Clyde Shelton (Butler). Shelton’s pissed at Rice because Rice made a deal with the more savage of the crooks (the hillbilly) in order to get a death row conviction on the less violent of the two. Naturally, as these criminal situations go in Hollywood movies, one of the crooks was a sadist, while the other “doesn’t want to be here, man.”

Naturally Clyde thinks justice was not served, and he’s probably not alone; Rice so concerned about his conviction record made a deal with give the most horrible of the duo three years in prison. Is this the same United States that has a higher per cent per capita of their country’s population in prisons than any other nation on Earth? Doubtful. Yes friends, Clyde is the true hero of this mess, but he’s treated no better than your average super-villain. Does he not have a right to be angry? Isn’t Rice a short-sighted jerk that clearly never read a witness statement or saw a piece of evidence before making the deal in Clyde’s case? If you were a freelance Q working for the US Department of Defense, wouldn’t you use your skills to get some payback? Actually, make that extreme payback? Exactly! But instead Clyde is treated like some second-string Dr. Evil, while Rice is the crusading hero. And now I’m bored. Law Abiding Citizen does not abide for this dude.

Lemon Tree

Rating: ***1/2

There something about reducing the issues surrounding the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to a dispute between neighbours about a grove of trees along where their properties meet that is just really simplistic in both good and bad ways. A surprisingly complex dramedy that offers no easy answers, Lemon Tree is about one woman’s determination to fight the power even though the House has written the rules to their favour. It’s occasionally insightful, but sometimes taxing, although buoyed by some strong performances and some interesting characters. It doesn’t strain too much, but then again, it’s pretty comfortable with not pushing the envelope either.

The title references a grove of trees bearing the sour fruit that grow in the back of the property owned by Salma (Hiam Abbass of The Visitor) who makes a meagre living off of canning lemons. Her property borders the fence line where the controversial wall separating Israel and the West Bank will be built, and her new neighbour on the Israeli side is none other than the Israel Defense Minister and his wife (Doron Tavory and Rona Lipaz-Michael). Israeli secret service, concerned with the minister’s security, order the lemon grove cut down despite all their other security precautions. Salma refuses to abide the court order and with the help of a young Palestinian attorney (Ali Suliman), she goes to Israeli court to fight for her right to grow lemons.

A good courtroom movie has its advantages, and so does Lemon Tree even though it’s not strictly a courtroom movie. Working in the film’s favour is the uniqueness of the case, the ambiguity of the central quandary and fact that this is a legal system foreign to us with entirely different thoughts, concerns and precedents. But watching this movie for the legal briefs is like watching Die Hard for the romantic scenes between John and Holly at the end. What I liked about the film is its leisurely pace and its questioning, the world is grey perspective. Also Abbass holds down the film remarkably well, making you feel Salma’s plight, her inner turmoil in fighting a battle she both can’t win and must win, and her attraction to the young lawyer who’s nearly the same age as her son.

But the complexities of Salma’s character get overshadowed by how loosely some of the other characters are written. Despite a heroic effort on the part of Tavory to inject some sweet humanity into the Minister Navon but he often comes off as a Snidely Whiplash caricature of cartoon villainy; like someone the Three Stooges or the Marx Brothers might have made mince meat out of. And I could have done with a little less of the ubiquitous, old school Muslims who stop by Salma’s for some tasty lemonade and to warn her that she best be not making eyes with lawyer lest she disgrace and dishonour her late husband. The movie does have a bit of fun with it though; frequently the director cuts to a shot of the grumpy-faced husband looking disapprovingly at everyone from the kitchen wall.

What I appreciate is that the filmmakers are clearly trying to show the true colour of things, saying that there’s no such thing as compromise or even really trust in a situation like this. It’s a truism to be sure, and solutions to the larger problems, like the relatively small ones focused on in the movie, don’t come easy. Like the Minister’s wife – played with endearing frustration by Lipaz-Michael - we feel spurned to act against injustice, but feel paralyzed when it comes to deciding how to affect justice. Despite some hiccups, the story is compelling and Abbass plays extremely sympathetic as Salma. Lemon Tree is actually very winning in its belief and advocacy that sometimes there’s value in fighting the hopeless battle, because you never know what you might start.