Page Eight (2011)

Directed by: David Hare

Written and directed by David Hare, Page Eight is a TV movie that aspires to cinematic release (it’s being shown at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, despite having already gone out on terrestrial TV in Britain).

Bill Nighy plays Johnny Worricker, a senior MI5 officer who discovers something rotten buried in a secret report given to him by his boss (Michael Gambon), who is also his best friend and husband of Johnny’s first wife.  (Still with me?)   Meanwhile, his next door neighbour Nancy (Rachel Weisz) turns out to be the sister of an activist killed by the Israelis in circumstances that have been covered up.  Back in the office, Jill Tankard (Judy Davis), is up to no good.  And who is that young man Tom (Ralph Wilson) who keeps popping up?  The strands of the story start to intertwine, the pressure on Johnny mounts, and he is faced with a career- (and maybe life-) threatening decision.

I wanted to like Page Eight, I really did.   An espionage conspiracy/cover up tale with some glossy production values (London looks lovely in a number of outdoor night-time scenes) and several of my favourite actors (Nighy, Weisz, Gambon, Davis and Ralph Fiennes), it could and should have been an excellent thriller.  So what went wrong?

Once the opening shots are out of the way, it’s not very cinematic – lots of interior scenes (but without a sense of claustrophobia that would have added to our understanding of the threat felt by the main characters) and some dialogue that is rather awkward in a movie: at times it feels more like a play.  The plot is overly coincidence-driven (I won’t spoil the story by revealing more).  Rachel Weisz is largely wasted, while Nighy seems to be reprising his performance from 2005’s The Girl in the Café (that would be no bad thing if the consequences of having a hero with that kind of repressed personality were developed, but that doesn’t happen).

But above all, it’s the lack of ambition that sinks the production.  It feels small in every way.  As in the TV series Spooks, MI5 appears to consist of about five people, while the locations feel severely constrained by what I expect were budget limitations.  And the key plot element (the CIA has been torturing people, and the British government may have known) is not exactly going to make viewers’ hearts miss a beat.  It can’t rise to the level of being a thriller, and doesn’t explore its characters fully enough to be a great drama.