Review: Hidden Agenda (Loach, Ken; 1990)

Since I couldn't find any interesting screen-grabs for the movie, I chose a picture of Ken Loach because he has such a beautiful smile.

The average conspiracy theory movie/political thriller has the following elements. A killing. The victim who knows too much or is in possession of some material that would permit her to know too much. The distraught friend/fiancee/spouse who is unpersuaded by initial investigations that round off the incident as an accident or mere killing. People who think that she is nuts. An investigator who is intrigued by the mysterious circumstances of the death. The friend/fiancee/spouse who now has the investigator as a confidant. Therefore, love affair. Investigations going on. The unveiling of a conspiracy of immense proportions that makes one hurl objects at the screen. Ending: Revenge and the triumph of truth! Or cover-up and complicity by the investigator i.e. the triumph of evil!

Give or take a couple of the above elements, throw in the political and social turmoil of 1980s Northern Ireland, a couple of bastard Englishmen conspirators, then you pretty much have the idea of what Ken Loach's Hidden Agenda (1990) is about. An American civil rights lawyer, Paul (Brad Dourif), with an international panel of civil rights people are in N. Ireland to survey and compose a report on human rights violations committed by British police and armed forces. On the eve of their departure Paul is shot and a mysterious audio tape is taken off his body by the gunmen. What follows is apparently a cover-up. Paul's fiance, Ingrid (Frances McDormand), who is accompanying and serving with him on the panel, assumes foul-play. Given the possible international repercussions of the incident, a head investigator from the CID, Kerrigan (Brian Cox), is brought in from the mainland. Equally skeptical and eager to get to the source of any dirty business, Kerrigan is unhesitating with the "stepping on toes", or so he cordially informs Ingrid. A possible conspiracy is then investigated and so on.

Despite winning the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1990 and being laden with the correct politics (or how else would it have won), Hidden Agenda is at its core an unhappy type of formulaic nonsense. The unfortunate thing, however, is that the movie has all the markings of what otherwise would have been a great one. Shot in a fresh naturalistic style that has made Loach famous, the first half of the movie is both engaging and full of intrigue, or at least I thought. On the side, it also helped that the film's subject matter turned out quite thorny. Subjecting a allegedly modern democratic nation to scrutiny for its various abuses of human rights doesn't come along often (although we shouldn't exactly be surprised given Britain's less than stellar record for, as the movie puts, "800 years"). Signs of governmental injustice naturally suck the audience in and as viewers we want the proxy retribution that movie plots can offer us. In this sense, parts of the movie worked well for me. Add good acting into the mix and the ingredients for a serious grown-up movie are all in order.

Where Hidden Agenda starts to go wrong is in straddling the conventions of its genre while playing the critique off the bench. Typically for the conspiracy thriller, the eventual unveiling of what the conspiracy actually is leaves the audience having problems stomaching whatever fancy thing the writers have written up. The issue with Hidden Agenda isn't so much a matter of the conspiracy being completely ludicrous but that it is simply boring. The film serves us the usual lot: behind-the-scenes right-wing forces conspiring to hasten the demise of a lefty government through nefarious means. Regardless of one's politics, this isn't interesting stuff nor is it particularly surprising. Worse yet, much of this has nothing to do with the politics of Northern Ireland as much as it has to do with the dirtiness of politics in general (not even distinctly British). The nature of the conspiracy throws the strife and politics of Northern Ireland into merely a volatile and convenient backdrop, while stepping up the volume to complain about quite something else. But as always there has to be a large-scale conspiracy pitching dark against light, right against left!

Furthermore, why is it that all the conspirators in conspiracy movies flake off from the same cookie-cutter, pardon my abusing of the cookie-cutter cliche. In Loach's movie there are again those usual interchangeable elderly white men who mask their slimy insides with the proper posh and polish. And by custom they have their suit pockets lined with all that same sophistry about the greater good, national security, etc. etc. Perhaps its about time someone made a movie about the motivations of these conspirator types and not in the biographical format of ascension to power, a villain in a super-hero movie, but as in an accurate depiction of how those men actually live with themselves. 

When compared to a more dynamic and hard-hitting film of arguably the same genre, such as Costa-Gavras's exemplary Z (1969), the end result of Hidden Agenda is severely lacking not only in flair but in effect and identity. By forsaking any virtuoso moments in favor of realism, it is understandable that Loach tries to hedge the agenda of Hidden Agenda on an apparent lack of bias. Yet as a film like Z has shown us it doesn't really matter; Z has no hidden agenda because it wears everything on its face. To not do so by playing it straight risks the movie comes off as a disingenuous political thriller and not much more. Again, as I mentioned before, this is unfortunate given that a great movie was almost at hand.