Cumberbatch delivers as ‘The Courier’
You’ve seen it all before. And yet that doesn’t make the spycraft celebrated in Cold War espionage thriller “The Courier” — or the film itself — any less compelling.
More competent than inventive, ‘The Courier” benefits from a strong performance by lead Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as the work of supporting player Merab Ninidze, in telling a story about the bond between an everyman-turned-spy and the Russian officer-turnedwestern asset he bravely tried to help.
Based on a true story, “The Courier” begins in 1960, as the nuclear-arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union has intensified.
A Soviet military colonel, Oleg Penkovsky (Ninidze) believes his country’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, is courting a confrontation with America and is a great danger to the world.
Early on in the film, Oleg spots two American tourists on the streets of Moscow and follows them into the shadows, where he asks them to take a letter he has written to the U.S. embassy. One agrees.
Cut to MI6 headquarters in London, where a CIA operative, Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), visits two of her counterparts at the British intelligence agency.
“I brought you boys a present,” she says, giving
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them the letter, in which Oleg says he fears nuclear war is coming and that he wants to help prevent it.
Admitting the U.S. is “thin on the ground” in Moscow, Emily’s hoping England can provide someone who could pass information to and from Oleg in person. Enter Cumberbatch’s Greville Wynne, a mild-mannered businessman with zero espionage experience.
“I’m just a salesman,” Greville says in a subsequent meeting with Rachel and one of the Brits, Dickie Franks (Angus Wright). “Exactly,” Emily says. Greville is reluctant — he fears for his life and doesn’t want to leave wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley) without a husband and son Andrew (Keir Hills) without a father — but agrees to be their courier.
In Moscow, and working through Oleg’s official capacity, Greville grows fond of his Russian counterpart and vice versa.
“You’re a good amateur,” Oleg tells him.
So comfortable with Greville is Oleg that when the former has served his initial purpose, the latter insists he stay involved with the ongoing effort. He really wants to be done with the affair, but Emily gives him the hard, nuclear-based sell, which he finds manipulative and causes him to walk away from Dickie and her.
“Truly, we’ll be better off if he doesn’t do it,” Dickie says. “He’ll do it,” Emily counters.
She’s right, of course, and from here the web only gets more dangerous for both Greville and Oleg, as the backdrop for their work becomes the Cuban Missle Crisis.
“The Courier” is rather skillfully penned by Tom O’connor (“The Hitman’s Bodyguard”), who found Wynne to be little more than a footnote in a book he was reading that was dealing with the much-better-known Penkovsky.
That led him to more books, including Wynne’s 1967 autobiography, “The Man From Moscow: The Story of Wynne and Penkovsky,” which some have asserted tells an unreliable version of events, according to the film’s production notes.
Setting aside exactly how accurate the story told in “The Courier” is, it is fairly gripping, much of the credit for that belonging to director Dominic Cooke (“On Chesil Beach”). There is little fat to be found here, although the film does lose a bit of momentum after it takes a necessary sharp turn for its final act.
As he so often is, Cumberbatch (“The Imitation Game,” “Doctor Strange”) is quite good.
His work is understated but believable as the pressures of the citation begin to get to Greville.
And you instantly become invested in Oleg thanks to Ninidze (“Nowhere in Africa”). Oleg almost always is calm, collected and altogether stoically Russian, so when Ninidze allows us to see the panic flowing beneath the surface, we know the situation is serious.
The most disappointing aspect to “The Courier” is that it doesn’t make greater use of Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “I’m Your Woman”).
She’s fine as Emily — an unremarkable character created for the movie — but she doesn’t get to show her acting talent much here.
“The Courier” feels determined never to go over the top in its telling of this high-stakes story, which you certainly can appreciate. Yes, you’ve seen it all before — and you’ve seen it done bigger — but this is well worth seeing nonetheless.