The Whistleblower (2011)

Whistleblower starring, you guessed it, Rachel Weiz. A whistleblower is someone who informs the public or tells someone in authority about dishonest or illegal activity (lawyers always put in alleged before dishonest/illegal) that has occurred, or is occurring in a Government department, a public or private organisation, or a company. What Whistleblower shows are there is no real distinction between any of these categories. The corporation is the Government and vice versa. They make more money than an arms dealer in the post war deals that Government/corporations cut (see Iraq /Afghanastan) in the futile hope that, ironically, they can save American lives and more importantly for a corporate America: money; billions and billions of dollars that private companies make for themselves. This is not Maise who works in the shop is stealing out of the shop. This is Maisie, with names like DynCorp, AirScan and the aptly named GlobalEnforce. Inc., who have come to own the shop and complaining the customers aren’t doing enough buying.

But Rachel Weiz’s Whistleblower, is based on happier, less cynical, times. Bush wasn’t even President. Kathryn Bolkovac is a good cop, not bad cop, because of course she is played by Rachel Weiz, who needs to leave her job to work as peacekeeper for the UN, after the Dayton accord, to make enough money to jump state from Nebraska and be with her estranged daughter. This means she needs to go to Sarajevo, via post war Yugoslavia with it volatile mix of Bosnians, Serbs and Croats and I’m not even going to throw in the Muslim/Orthodox religious angle. Like many before her she finds the UN job of ‘overseeing’ peace to be another way of doing nothing much and getting paid for it. She does her best to carry on being good cop abroad. This leads her to a hidden world where the peacekeeper’s diplomatic immunity doesn’t just mean they can park on double yellows and say ‘fuck-you’ to the police, but they can actively collude in the big business of human trafficking, for sex, of young woman from other perhaps even poorer zones of the post USSR era. The irony being, of course, the very men being paid to protect them are fuelling the demand for those women for sex i.e. the ones with the money paying for sex are the UN workers. Nobody wants to know because its bad for the corporate image and as Cathy finds out what is bad for business is bad for America. Only, of course, it wasn’t Americans at fault. It was UN workers. That could never happen in good old US of A. Play that anthem.