From the instant Page Eight starts we know where we are. The camera focuses on Bill Nighy’s face. He lights a cigarette and, as jazz music sulks away on the soundtrack, he strides out into the night. Johnny Worricker (Nighy) is another of Raymond Chandler’s white knights tilting at baddies out on the mean streets and we’re in a noirish thriller set in a world of duplicity.
Personally, I’ll watch anything with Nighy in it, his gangling deadpan generally improving everything it’s inserted into. But there are two other “watch anything they’re in” presences in Page Eight. Michael Gambon (not in it nearly long enough), “the Great Gambon” as Ralph Richardson called him, and Judy Davis, both of whom play Worricker’s superiors at whatever branch of the British intelligence services he works at. If Nighy is Michael Caine in The Ipcress File, think of Gambon and Davis in the Nigel Green and Guy Doleman roles, if that isn’t too oblique.
It is a great cast all the way through in fact. Rachel Weisz, Felicity Jones, Tom Hughes, Ralph Fiennes, Ewen Bremner.
Corruption in high places is its motor, the telltale evidence first spotted by the eagle-eyed Johnny – far smarter than he ever lets on – on page eight of a top-secret document about the British government’s knowledge of the US’s use of extraordinary rendition and torture on black sites.
Writer/director David Hare’s abiding concern with the workings (or failings) of public institutions is to the fore, and this being shot in 2011, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the threat of homegrown terrorism are part of the socio-cultural tapestry. Johnny, though one of the “elite”, is one of the good guys. How quaint 2011 now seems.
Hare feeds other stories into this main one detailing how Johnny winkles out the truth about the British government’s enabling compliance in the rendition, and they’re all “Johnny’s relationship with X” in nature – Johnny’s relationship with his estranged artist daughter (Felicity Jones), with the Prime Minister (Fiennes), an alum of the same Oxbridge college, with his mysterious activist neighbour (Weisz), with his ex wife (Alice Krige), who is now married to his oldest chum and boss (Gambon). “We share a wife,” Johnny says drily at one point à propos a plot detail which suggests more than it delivers.
Worricker is the classic spy who cares too much and is so engrossed in his work that he can’t switch off. This leads to him constantly being accused by anyone he’s close to of being duplicitous when in fact it’s everyone else in his crazy mixed-up world who’s dealing from the bottom of the pack.
Some aspects of Hare’s plot now seem a touch politically naive, but in any case it’s not altogether clear what Hare thinks he’s making here – an angry political thriller or one of those cosy TV detective dramas like Inspector Morse, with Oxbridge locations, little antique shops set in picturesque towns with crooked streets, and featuring droves of top-notch character actors.
It’s not going to shock, in other words, and its final reveals, as the bad guy is revealed, are all too depressingly familiar. Some things flat-out don’t work, in particular Johnny’s relationship with his too-keen neighbour, which hits all sorts of bum notes, in spite of Rachel Weisz as the mysterious Nancy Pierpan, the 20 year age gap now looking a bit of a stretch in a post #MeToo world. But as an opener to two more Worricker films (Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield, both from 2014), it’s an enjoyable and even relaxing whodunit. And who doesn’t want to watch Nighy in action?
Page Eight – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2021
