‘The Courier’ delivers first-rate Cold War spy tale
Benedict Cumberbatch leads a first-rate cast as reallife Cold War businessmanturned-spy Greville Wynne in “The Courier.”
Directed by theater and film regular Dominic Cooke (“The Hollow Crown”), the film rises to the level of such entries as “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Bridge of Spies.”
It tells the nuclear arms race-era tale of Wynne, a hard-drinking and smoking “Mad Men”-style businessman with a young wife named Sheila (Jessie Buckley) and 10-year-old son. Greville loses at golf to please his customers. Because he frequently travels to Eastern Europe, Greville is selected by MI6 agent Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and CIA operative Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) to travel to Moscow to contact Oleg Penkovsky (a mesmerizing turn by Merab Ninidze) of the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research.
Oleg, who asks to be called Alex, also has a wife and young child, a daughter named Nina (Emma Penzina). At first, Greville and Penkovsky have fun together, going to the Bolshoi and enjoying caviar at lunch. But soon, Greville is taking tiny rolls of film back to the U.K. with him, film that MI6 shares with the CIA. Greville manages to stay out of trouble until the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he volunteers to go back to the Soviet Union to help Penkovsky arrange to defect.
“The Courier” begins in 1960 with a shot of a statue of Lenin and Chairman Krushchev (Vladimir Chuprikov) bellowing into a mike. The traitor Major Popov is summarily executed, and we know what is at stake. Penkovsky is a WWII hero and an ex-colonel. At the ballet, Chairman Krushchev notices Penkovsky with Greville beside him in the audience below from his box and quickly waves.
Cumberbatch, who wears a weird hairpiece, makes
Greville a bit of a middleclass buffoon at the beginning. He was a private in the war and never saw combat. But he displays considerably more pluck than anyone expected. He is a most unlikely James Bond. Sheila has caught him cheating and forgiven him. Wynne keeps his wife in the dark about his exploits.
Penkovsky visits London, has dinner with the Wynnes, gives their son a toy rocket ship and does the Twist with Sheila. Ninidze, who played the Soviet interrogator in “Bridge of Spies,” gives Penkovsky a zeal and a decency that make his idealism real and noble. Screenwriter Tom O’Connor (“The Hitman’s Bodyguard”) does a fine job building the details. The KGB is almost everywhere, and where it is not, there are citizens eager to inform on one another, including professional lip readers. The fear Greville experiences sharpens his libido. “What was that?” a
happily baffled Sheila asks after one session. Kennedy warns the world of the “nuclear Sword of Damocles” hanging over its head.
For fans of John le Carre and the real-life stories that inspired him, “The Courier” is a gift. As the tension ratchets up, composer Abel Korzeniowski (“Nocturnal Animals”) goes all Bernard Herrmann, teasing a bit of
Hitchcock into the proceedings. In the third act, the going gets grim indeed, and Cumberbatch and Ninidze both made great sacrifices to play their characters under extreme duress. In one scene, they appear to be cadavers conversing in the dark.