All Aboard! The Rachel Weisz Oscar Bandwagon Departs Now

It's almost that time again: The fall movie season, when critics sharpen their wits, audiences sniff through Hollywood's fetid miasma of hype, and awards-beat observers recalibrate their Oscarometers for the most precise reads on the encroaching horde of late-year releases. But as recent years have shown us, you don't necessarily need to debut after Labor Day to be taken seriously as an awards contender. In fact, August may as well be the new December where some major categories are concerned. Which brings us to Rachel Weisz.

Needless to say, Weisz is not exactly hurting on the respectability or visibility fronts. She has two high-profile premieres forthcoming at next month's Toronto Film Festival, including Terence Davies's adaptation of the classic Terence Rattigan play The Deep Blue Sea and her reunion with Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles in 360. As if these didn't represent enough of a boost, her recent marriage to Dream House co-star Daniel Craig landed Weisz in the pages of movie blogs and celebrity rags alike. On paper, anyway, she's positioned to make a run at unprecedented creative, professional and personal success, up to and including Davies's likely awards-bait dangling in front of the Academy, BAFTA, the Golden Globes and any other other voting body that's paying attention.

The latter scenario, of course, assumes that Sea is a) good and b) will find a Stateside buyer willing to float it for consideration this fall opposite early contenders like Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs) and... Rachel Weisz?

Believe it. We've not been shy about suggesting as much around here, but unequivocally and for the record, Weisz delivers the performance of her career in The Whistleblower. Not bad, considering she already possesses a Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in Gardener and excellence in last year's sadly underseen Agora. And again, any number of her three films this fall may in fact surpass all of these. But there's something uniquely captivating about her turn as Kathryn Bolkovac, the real-life Nebraska police officer whose stint as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia exposed the organization's connection to an international human-trafficking and sex-slavery ring. Weisz cites the story's spiritual antecedents like Silkwood and Erin Brockovich, and indeed, as co-written and directed by Larysa Kondracki, The Whistleblower confers both the first film's dark middle-class intrigue and the second film's spunk and charisma, showing off two distinct sides of the underdog genre's heroic coin.

Yet in the end, The Whistleblower isn't really about the coin. It's about where the coin lands -- amid a tragedy of unimaginable scale, one in which bureaucrats are indistinguishable from murderers, where lives are traded and discarded with impunity by the very people entrusted to save them. As Bolkovac, Weisz purposefully stalks through this universe, a Midwestern mom absorbing squalid scenes of abjection while the investigator unravels the scandalous plot around her. Knowing that it's not as though viewers need to come around to morally aligning themselves with Bolkovac, Weisz does something brilliant with the character: She chips away at the implications and consequences of obsession -- that of the crusader, the oppressed and the oppressor.

Take a look at these three scenes, the first of which features Bolkovac's first encounter with the horror-show environment into which Ukranian girls are sold and eventually kept as sex slaves. Bewildered at first by the alien setting but furiously piecing its elements together behind her eyes, she pins a dirty local police boss to the mat before he squirms away. But watch those eyes right when the boss mentions "whores"; they betray Bolkovac ever so slightly, supplying the film's first evidence that she might be out of her constitutional depth:

Bolkovac's first encounter with one of the girls results in a more outward panic, laying out her humanity in sharp relief. But again, the average viewer will meet Weisz more than halfway when it comes to sympathizing with Bolkovac and The Whistleblower's victims. But how do we relate to her male colleagues who've happily embroiled themselves in the flesh racket? We and Bolkovac know enough to loathe them, but how do we work through that to manipulate what we want out of them? That's another dimension of the performance that Weisz navigates with cool and aplomb:

On the flip side, when the victims have essentially been exploited, tormented and abused beyond any rational understanding, how do you persuade them to give you what you want? At some fundamental level, even for a professional like Bolkovac, the natural answer has to be, "I don't know." And that's totally fine in the beginning. But the leap of faith that results is a thing of beauty and sensitivity that further enhances the dynamic range of Weisz's character:

The rest of the movie mines deeper and deeper into each of these relationships, as well as a sort of confessional three-way with a diplomat played by Vanessa Redgrave and an internal affairs officer sketched out with increasingly nervy paranoia by David Strathairn. It's not an easy sit -- least of all when Kondracki demonstrates the scope of the sexual abuses perpetrated by Bolkovac's targets -- but it is a visceral, revelatory one, made all the more remarkable by a climax exposing the true reach and insurmountability of the corruption. And in taking it beyond the simple David vs. Goliath framework -- showing instead what David might be like if building his slingshot totally consumed him -- Weisz elevates the material to a level that does in fact belong in the underdog canon alongside her cherished Silkwood and Erin Brockovich.

In recognition of both Weisz's performance and the disturbing reality that, as Roger Ebert notes this week in his review, the security contractor dramatized in the film remains in the service of the UN, The Whistleblower belongs in at least some broader cultural spotlight. Regardless of Weisz's successful Oscar history, awards-season recognition will get it there.

Which raises the question: Why would this open in August of all months, the seeming no-man's-land between blockbuster season and fall-festival frenzy? Actually, that's why The Whistleblower has a distinct advantage: It has a distributor (Samuel Goldwyn), and it's being released as we speak. There's nothing to shop around or, worse yet, potentially lose in the shuffle at Toronto (as Whistleblower was after its 2010 premiere at the same fest, where Natalie Portman and Fox Searchlight took the Oscar lead and never looked back). Moreover, August's reputation as a ghetto of cinematic castoffs, dregs and untouchables has seen a recent awards-season restoration thanks to films like Inglourious Basterds, District 9 and -- most importantly for Weisz's purposes -- the actress-friendly trifecta of Julie and Julia, Frozen River and Animal Kingdom. Even The Kids Are All Right may as well have been an August release, officially springboarding Annette Bening into last year's Best Actress hunt with its blockbuster limited opening on July 30. (Kids, River and Kingdom all benefited from Sundance break-outs as well.) Life after August is real.

In any case, The Whistleblower expands out today from New York and Los Angeles to Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and San Diego. The race is on. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. And until I see any better, my Oscarometer points to Weisz.