In The Woman in Cabin 10, Netflix’s new potboiler, Keira Knightley plays a fearless justice warrior, a lone voice of dogged truth in a maelstrom of corruption, and this is not her first foray into such terrain: six years ago she played the whistleblower Katharine Gun in Official Secrets, the 2019 film about some pretty dicey US and UK behaviour before the Iraq war.
This time round she’s a journalist, though – and not just any old hack, a Guardian journalist. Exhausted and possibly traumatised by a crusading investigation she has just finished about some bad people doing bad things, she accepts a trip on a billionaire’s yacht for a breather, only to discover that billionaires are also bad. You cannot call that a spoiler, even though it technically is one. You’re reading the Guardian, for Pete’s sake.
Journalists on screen are always idealised, whatever paper they’re from – film amps up the tenacity, intelligence, commitment and, often, cardiovascular fitness of hacks, which is fair enough: that’s its business, to filter out frailty. The only rose-tint that bugs me with print journalism, and this has been bugging me since Almost Famous came out a quarter of a century ago, is that all the drama happens in a situation where interesting things are going down and the key players actively want to include a journalist. It just isn’t true to life. Any time a billionaire, or a rock quartet, or some generals, or a prime minister, actively want to talk to you, it’s to tell you something boring, to keep you busy. But this is a pet peeve; back to Knightley, on her yacht, being told real things, when a murder happens.
Box sets and films dealing specifically with the Guardian – Snowden, about the CIA whistleblower and the paper; The Hack, about Nick Davies’s hacking investigation; its role in The Bourne Ultimatum – idealise in bespoke ways. They always make the office look incredibly lively, people constantly leaping up and pointing at each other in a universally understood semaphore of hard news, whereas in real life people are disappointingly quiet and sedentary, often, en masse, remaining so still that the movement-triggered lights go off. Knightley in this film is exquisitely tailored. The stories always get into print incredibly fast, with nobody ever saying: “We won’t be able to say this until it’s been proven in a court of law, which will take roughly 18 months.”
Why they used the Guardian in The Hack and Snowden is self-evident, it’s because those things happened here; in The Hack, the performances are so close in mannerism and bearing that you just have to hand it to them, they obviously were trying to work with what they had. David Tennant is spookily like Nick Davies, Toby Jones doesn’t physically resemble former editor Alan Rusbridger but almost shapeshifts. All other considerations (please stop saying “redacted”, it’s very distancing; is it too much to ask that the bad guys go down for something?) melt away. In Snowden, I was constantly distracted by the glamour of people being journalists, yet also being in the US, or Hong Kong or Russia. There was no gloss, here! Janine Gibson (now at the Financial Times, played with a Her-Own Girl Friday briskness and vim by Joely Richardson) genuinely was in New York at the time, this shouldn’t push at the boundaries of disbelief-suspension, and yet it does.
When it’s an entirely fictional character, set in this newspaper that really exists, you have to wonder what the film is trying to say with that. Paddy Considine admitted straight to our faces that he’d had to “to wimp down a little bit” to play Simon Ross, security correspondent, and this is a) because he’s in this with Matt Damon, so has to be his opposite (a wimp); b) because he’s gonna die in a minute, so you mustn’t fall in love with him; and c) because he’s meant to embody the noblest search, for truth without ego.
A mixed bag, then, for the newspaper as trope; very moral, not very sexy. There are some neat observational lines that approximate the trade pretty well – when Bourne is on his phone, directing him through Waterloo concourse, telling him to go “east”, he surmises correctly that he won’t know which way that is, adding “your left”. But then there are other lines like, “This isn’t some story in a newspaper, this is real. Do you understand me?”, to which Ross replies, “Yes” – whereas in real life, he would say, “Actually, all the stories in our newspaper are also real,” and then maybe Bourne would reply, “What about that time you told everyone to vote Lib Dem”, in the middle of which the CIA would shoot Ross in the head.
Why Knightley has to work here, for The Woman in Cabin 10, could be to convey in shorthand her sense of civic duty, or it could be to give her a dusting of wholemeal flour (oh, there’s that pill of a woman again, who could be drinking champagne but instead is going on about the dead body she just saw), or it could be to give the whole thing a Gaslight-y frisson, she’s a journalist that a bad guy could plausibly persuade everyone was totally insane.
Sometimes the paper pops up on its own as just a thing people are reading – in Wallace and Gromit, in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – and I want to say it’s there to signify: “This is the baseline reading matter of the everyman.” Maybe in Wallace and Gromit it is, but I think in fact it’s a global-audience thing, they can’t use the Times because an American audience will go: “The New York is missing and the font is wrong.”
In Killing Me Softly (2002) the Guardian is everywhere; its journalist interviewing one of the other characters, another character masquerading as a hack, all of them constantly reading it. It’s widely thought of as the worst film of all time. It’s just a coincidence; no actual Guardian journalists were harmed in the making of that film.
