“The Courier”, a true life-based espionage thriller set in the early 1960s – and staged to attract audiences old enough to live them – stubbornly resists involving us or affecting us until it’s almost over. At this point, however, you may have fallen asleep.
Ideally, this shouldn’t happen while watching two guys standing – one British, one Russian – perhaps narrowly avoiding a nuclear apocalypse. But the director, Dominic Cooke (whose 2018 premiere, “On Chesil Beach”, moved the tragedy of broken intimacy), is either unable to generate tension or simply chooses not to do so. The Cuban missile crisis may approach in the background, but we barely perceive his threat, since Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a common English salesman, is enlisted as an intermediary between MI6 (in the form of a mild Angus Wright) and a Soviet officer named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze)
With its rooms lined with wood and feathered cigarette smoke, “The Courier” is espionage cinema in its most decorous form. Unfortunately, no one is cutting karate or turning fountain pens into small daggers. (Instead, they have lunch and go to ballet.) Wynne, they say, must be given an intensive espionage course before accepting Soviet secrets, but Tom O’Connor’s impassive script is actively opposed to such excitement. We need a montage!
Although Jessie Buckley, as Wynne’s suspicious wife, and Rachel Brosnahan, as a playfully aggressive CIA agent, welcome female energy clashes, “The Courier” is essentially the story of an extraordinary male friendship. The mutual compassion of men peaks too late to save the image, but it is no less poignant for that.
The Courier
Rated PG-13 for a bit of violence and a blink and miss room scene. Execution time: 1 hour and 51 minutes. In theaters. Consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies in theaters.