Smart flick about intelligence

Page Eight 2011 U.K. Masterpiece Contemporary (103 minutes) directed and written by David Hare

This trim and stylish made-for-television political thriller snipes at British politicians who aggrandize their roles and station at the expense of public credulity over fairy tale threats despite the professional advice and expertise of their own agencies.

Several elements are at play here. There is the age-old friction between political decision makers and their intelligence providers, big egos pursuing agendas versus knowing things and taking action upon that knowledge. There is the issue of freedom jeopardized by actual, imagined, or invented safety and security interests. And, this being Britain, there is class: Queen and country and old school tie patriotism against the ‘new’ men and women who know or have learnt better, particularly from the American cousins.

However, an older American lesson informs the mood.

The story opens with Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) leaving work on foot in the late evening, smoking a cigarette to Lester Young’s tenor saxophone playing Fine & Mellow. Young’s horn tells us in its rich melodic voice that Worricker—an affable middle-aged spook with a good art collection, ‘married less than five times’—is a modern incarnation of one of film noir’s flawed knights on London’s mean streets.

The matter is that Worricker’s boss, Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon), the wily but aging director general of MI-5, Britain’s domestic security service, has a rather large rat by the tail.

A ‘gold standard’ source has informed Baron that Prime Minister Alec Beasley (Ralph Fiennes) not only knows about international American ‘black sites’ where detainees in the ‘War on Terror’ are tortured to extract information, but that the PM himself suppressed specific knowledge thereby obtained that could have prevented a major incident in Britain.  

Baron put this information on ‘page eight’ of a ‘U.K. eyes only’ brief that he discusses at a meeting with Home Secretary Anthea Catcheside (Saskia Reeves), Jill Tankard (Judy Davis), his second-in-command, and Worricker, his longtime colleague and former Cambridge student. The meeting makes for an amusing set piece.

The Home Secretary of course never actually read the brief. It falls on Worricker the analyst to point out the damning detail on page eight. Catcheside, playing Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, immediately grasps the dim light in which this information casts her politically. She threatens Baron that she will take the report to a rival agency ‘across the river,’ exclaiming with peremptory glee that he will be ‘royally fucked!’

‘The service has been fucked many times,’ Baron reassures her with a twinkle in his eye, ‘usually by your government jumping on us like Rover with a hard-on, and we’ve always survived the experience.’ The purpose for sharing this information with her, Baron explains, is not that she do something, but that she know everything.

A-ha! Calmer heads prevail; or, at least, one is convinced that it might be better to lie low for the moment rather than to risk looking like the idiot she may well be... But after the meeting, Baron tells Worricker with the same twinkle that he ‘put a bomb in the water, and I’m waiting to see where the dead fish lead.’

All of a sudden, people start taking an inordinate interest in the self-deprecating Worricker, from the PM to Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz), the lovely neighbor he has never met with whom he shares a landing. The Lebanese-born Pierpan is an editor and activist whose activist brother Jake evidently came to a violent, quickly covered-up end in the West Bank at the hands of Israeli military personnel.

Pierpan appears to be friends with Ralph Wilson (Tom Hughes), who starts turning up places Worricker goes, as well as other people Worricker cannot see but knows are there—and whom we see him use old tradecraft effectively to evade.

It turns out that Baron’s dead fish lead all over the place—and naturally these include red herring. When Baron drops dead of a heart attack, it falls on Worricker to go to his sources, including the ever dependable Rollo Maverley (Ewen Bremner), to sort, clean, dress, and prepare them.

A worried Beasley buttonholes Worricker after a dinner at their former Cambridge college. The idea is to call a royal commission to reorganize the intelligence services and set up a ‘Department of Homeland Security,’ Beasley says, in which there could well be room for great advancement for Worricker—‘Or it’s opposite,’ Worricker says.  

He tells the PM that he is well aware that circumstances have forced him ‘into an area closer to politics than it is to security.’

‘In times of national emergency,’ Beasley counsels him, ‘the two are the same. Nothing is more dangerous than when people make mischief trying to separate them.’

The drama lies in how skilfully Worricker engages in what he said Baron always referred to as ‘dishonorable work you could do in an honorable way,’ making dangerous ‘mischief’ as he navigates family, office, intergovernmental, national and international politics to find where Baron’s dead fish lead.

Worricker’s character and circumstances determine how he leverages this information in the end, and leave an intriguing opening for a promising sequel.