REVIEW: Rachel Weisz Keeps The Whistleblower from Straying into Self-Righteousness

Sometimes a movie's social conscience is better expressed through the faces of its actors than through its words. That's the case with The Whistleblower, in which Rachel Weisz plays an American police officer who takes a job as a peacekeeper in postwar Bosnia only to learn that keeping any nominal notion of peace is impossible: She discovers that the area is rife with human trafficking, and that contractors working under the auspices of the United Nations and the State Department are directly involved.

The Whistleblower, the feature debut from filmmaker Larysa Kondracki, is based on real-life events and the experiences of a real person, Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who arrived in Bosnia in 1999. It's a gritty, often unsettling piece of work, though it does suffer from some of the structural problems that generally arise when you try to shape a composite of events and stories into a dramatic whole. (The script is by Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan.) There are times when the picture feels like a pile-up of horrors rather than a meaningfully shaped story -- it wants to open our eyes, but isn't sure what to do once it's got our attention.

Even so, the horrors it depicts are wholly believable, and it's not hard to buy the movie's case that the U.N. looked the other way while underage girls were essentially being sold into slavery, victims not just of general postwar devastation in the area, but of insidious human greed and cruelty. Kathy, as Weisz plays her, is one of those capable women who nonetheless finds herself in a situation she can't cope with. Her ex-husband is moving, along with the couple's daughter, across the country. Kathy can't get a transfer, and she can't afford to just pick up stakes and follow; her ex accuses her of having too much invested in her work as a cop, and the rest of the movie continues to ask, "How much investment is too much?" Kathy accepts the lucrative gig in Bosnia as a way to make enough money to live closer to her daughter. What she finds, instead, is a world of young women who need her even more than her daughter does.

In the movie's early moments, we meet a young Ukrainian woman named Raya (Roxana Condurache) who, urged on a by friend, becomes involved in what appears to be -- although it's never exactly spelled out -- some sort of shady escort scheme. All she wants to do is have a better life than her mother, a copy-shop worker, has. When we first see her, she's an open-faced young woman with an elfin smile; the next time we see her, she's been badly beaten and is in serious need of medical attention. She's somehow escaped a joint called the Florida Bar. When Kathy investigates the place after it has -- only allegedly, it turns out -- been raided by the police, she discovers what is essentially a torture chamber where young women are sexually abused, ostensibly in exchange for their papers and their freedom. They believe they're paying off a debt, but they're really being kept as slaves.

Kathy urges Raya to testify against the bar's owner, promising to protect her. But the more she learns about this and similar operations in the area, the more dangerous the situation becomes: It turns out that many of her colleagues are directly involved in the trafficking, and even the ones who aren't involved know about it and say nothing. Even before she begins untangling the most horrific threads of her case, she's told by one of her superiors, "We are not here as investigators. We monitor. That's it."

The Whistleblower effectively stipples what is at first just a small cloud of paranoia, eventually building it out to a suffocating, all-encompassing wall of fog. In places, Kondracki might go too far in spelling out the brutality suffered by these girls: There are a few shots too many of stained mattresses strewn on the floor and grimy bowls half-filled with urine. And the movie features lots of secondary characters whose roles aren't quite clear: One of those is played by Vanessa Redgrave -- she's a high-level human-rights official, but she can't seem to do much to help Kathy. Still, she gets to deliver plummy lines about human dignity. It's hard to tell how we're supposed to feel about her, and it may be because Kondracki doesn't know how she feels about her, either.

The always-dependable David Strathairn shows up as a police internal-affairs chief who finds his own authority overruled. (When Kathy arrives at a secret location to talk to him, he shakily offers her a drink and then takes one himself -- never a good sign.) Raya, as Condurache plays her, has a tragically courageous air about her -- she's the kind of woman who doesn't want to admit to her own vulnerability, even though it's painfully apparent.

But it's Weisz's face that provides the best window into the movie's motives and intentions. When she asks the ruggedly good-looking Dutch colleague she's been dating (played by Danish actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas) whether or not he knew about the trafficking, he offers a slightly hedgy answer, and Kondracki trains the camera on Weisz's unspoken response: We watch as her face searches his, parsing his expression for potential deceit. Weisz is a sensitive but sturdy actress, just what a director needs for a job like this. She doesn't hammer at the righteousness of the role, and she's in touch not just with Kathy's resoluteness but with her shortcomings, chiefly her misguided belief that she can protect these victimized girls when she can't even protect herself. At certain points, Weisz's face registers disbelief at the atrocities around her, and that disbelief is essential -- it's not naivete, but a way of reckoning with just how cruel and unjust the world can be. The Whistleblower may overstate some of its themes, but Weisz keeps dipping below the movie's surface, always looking for the shadowy underside of moral certainty. And if the movie sometimes treads too close to being self-congratulatory, Weisz always reels it back in. She makes human decency look anything but basic.