Le Carré adaptation that’s way off-target
Our Kind of Traitor 15 Cert, 108min Dir Susanna White Starring Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård, Damian Lewis, Naomi Harris, Jeremy Northam, Mark Gatiss, Grigoriy
What separates a topflight John le Carré adaptation, like Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man, from a sketchy one, like Susanna White’s Our Kind of Traitor, is a funny matter of alchemy and focus.
And it has a lot to do with casting – a strong suit in the BBC’s treatment of The Night Manager. You are left begging for a role here as wittily inhabited as Tom Hollander’s was there.
The film is unlucky-feeling. At one point, Hossein Amini’s script was intended for Justin Kurzel to direct, before he went off to do Macbeth instead. Ralph Fiennes and Mads Mikkelsen were eyeing the two main roles. Schedules filled up, so the pieces shifted around.
It’s a film whose final shape feels
‘If Lewis played James Bond this way, you’d want Moneypenny to sigh and boot him into the Thames’
dwindled by compromise – not unappealing, but stymied, like a luxury jet that spends two hours taxiing on the runway.
The problem is its pallid, bystander hero – a poetry lecturer called Perry Makepeace, who gets embroiled in negotiations to bring a well-connected Russian oligarch called Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) into the fold of British intelligence.
The Makepeace part needs someone who can pull off box-ticking establishing scenes in academia – a this-is-my-job lecture on The Waste
Land – and also drag us into the uneasy moral decisions that make le Carré’s universe so gripping.
Ewan McGregor and his star profile are here by default. He goes along with it all, in a totally unobjectionable but standard Ewan McGregor performance – blokeish, competent, compliant. After the first half-hour, Makepeace’s relevance is awkwardly up for grabs. If he weren’t such affable company, you wonder if MI6 might find some way to muddle through the whole plot without him.
Holidaying in Marrakesh, Makepeace and his lawyer wife Gail (Naomie Harris) are lured into Dima’s orbit, and something about this oily money-launderer and his tragic family attracts their empathy.
For point-proving MI6 agent Hector (Damian Lewis), he’s a conduit to some bigger fish: murderous mob boss The Prince (Grigoriy Dobrygin), and a cabal of corrupt British bankers and politicos, headed by slippery Islington North MP Aubrey Longrigg (Jeremy Northam), who are rolling in criminal Russian loot.
There’s animus between the Lewis and Northam characters, and one good, cutting scene when the gloves come off at a cocktail party.
Otherwise, Lewis, who dominates the film’s middle stretches, goes way overboard with the tight-lipped rhetoric and steely smarm. If he played James Bond this way, you’d want Moneypenny to sigh and boot him into the Thames.
Speaking of which: Harris barely gets a look-in, because, as Makepeace’s other half, she’s playing an adjunct to an adjunct – in it for the air miles, if that.
Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle should have thought of something, but doesn’t help his director’s cause with the tic of diffusing light everywhere, his images flaring up and glinting like an uninviting Russian bazaar.
Alone among the key cast, Skarsgård charges into his role with some sweat and pungency, playing Dima as a bedraggled beast of Moscow’s criminal underworld who lashes out when he’s wounded.
This part has survived, from book to script and casting switch. Skarsgård gives it a pained weight, splurging cash and clinging even to his new best friends, like a man who knows the good life’s metered and the clock is ticking.
Billed as the traitor, he’s just about the only one not letting us down.