The Courier: Cold War-Era Espionage Thriller Adds a Jewel to the Canon
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
Spy films just never get old, and almost no era save WWII (and maybe this current one, only time will tell) has brought more nail-biting, hair-raising real-life capers to the canon than the Cold War. Add director Dominic Cooke's well-crafted The Courier to the list.
Cooke’s film opens in 1960 when the atmosphere of fear and mistrust between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is peaking and, as the world will soon discover, is barreling towards the Cuban Missile Crisis which, as seen in 2000’s excellent Thirteen Days, skirted way closer to disaster than the public knew at the time.
Back to The Courier. The MI6 along with the CIA have a powerful source inside Moscow in Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze, he of the thousand-yard stare). But of course, the KGB is all ears and eyes, so the intelligence bureaus make the risky but tactically shrewd decision to recruit an ordinary British businessman, Greville Wynne (an arch, fuss-potty Benedict Cumberbatch, perfectly cast) to enter Russia and pretend to cultivate business interests with Penkovsky while smuggling out the classified information Penkovsky is collecting.
Wynne appears just too boring to be a spy, ergo, he is the perfect choice to throw the KGB off the scent.
What comes next will be familiar to enthusiasts of the genre: for a brief while, Wynne’s workaday life becomes fabulously more interesting as he hobnobs with hard-drinking Russians both in Moscow and in London and engages in covert ploys and coded conversations.
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He is exposed for the first time to the wonders of Russian ballet. There’s plane travel and exhilarating close-calls and those secret meetings with his British and American intelligence masters (Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan, respectively).
But it’s not long before relationships get sticky. Wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley) assumes Wynne’s sudden absences coupled with a newfound devotion to exercise and passionate lovemaking signal an affair. More consequentially, Wynne’s relationship to Penkovsky becomes personal, as the men reflect on life choices and fret about the impact those choices will have on their families. When the KGB finally ferrets out the leak, Wynne’s unerring devotion to Penkovsky seals both men’s fates.
Much of the joy of The Courier is in the era-specific details: the clothing, uniforms, furniture, and cars, the offhanded sexism even towards ranking intelligence officers like Borsnahan’s Emily Donovan (not joyous exactly but startling in its pervasiveness a mere generation ago); the familiar newsreel footage of the day; the Mad Men-worthy smoking, drinking, and general carousing; those terrifying missile maps of Cuba.
That Wynne’s story happened (we briefly meet him via archival footage at film’s end) amps up the gravitas of The Courier. And, as he demonstrated in his sharp 2017 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s spare but jaw-dropping On Chesil Beach, director Cooke makes even scenes chock-full of intense dialog seem fleet without sacrificing the tension. Sure, we’ve seen variations on this story and theme before but few better.
The Courier. Directed by Dominic Cooke. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, Jessie Buckley and Rachel Brosnahan. On demand and in select theatres now.