Benedict Cumberbatch, Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan in The Courier.
Photo: Liam Daniel / Courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions
Benedict Cumberbatch is a good bore. Despite that distinctive face and monotonous and sensual voice – or perhaps Why of them – there’s a comforting sturdiness in it that makes it ideal for playing loudly ordinary people. In Dominic Cooke’s The Courier, Cumberbatch plays an ordinary British businessman who engages in an elaborate Cold War espionage scheme in the early 1960s. It is the kind of role that an extraordinary and unpredictable actor simply would not play. A Daniel Day-Lewis or Gary Oldman would be completely lost on paper. You need a great actor who, however, can exude conventionality.
Cumberbatch is quite attractive as Greville Wynne, a modest and respectful engineer and salesman whose frequent business trips to Eastern Europe in the 1950s led American and British spy services to recruit him to carry messages from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) , a superior at the military intelligence agency of the USSR. These efforts led to important information about the Soviet military escalation in Cuba, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, but also ended up establishing a direct line between Moscow and Washington, supposedly saving the planet from future calamities. It is one of the most notable espionage stories of the 20th century, but The Courier he wisely presents it as a tale of personal loyalty, rather than geopolitics or espionage.
Cooke and screenwriter Tom O’Connor give Greville and Oleg’s relationship the subtle aura of clandestine romance. Walking down a dark Moscow street one night after their first meeting, their voices breaking with anxiety and fear, the men talk quietly. “We can talk here, it’s safe,” says Oleg, and then continues: “I have long dreamed of this moment. I wish I could say how much that means. ”After he delivers Oleg (code-named“ Ironbark ”, which was the film’s original and much more evocative title when it debuted at Sundance last year) to the hotel room where his CIA controller Emily (Rachel Brosnahan) is waiting , the door slowly and agonizingly closes in Greville’s face, and it is not difficult to imagine him as a rejected lover. What’s more, as his trips to Moscow become more frequent, Greville’s impatience with his family grows and his wife, Sheila (Jessie Buckley), begins to suspect that there may be another woman in the photo.
This notion of espionage connection as a kind of love affair is not cheap or meaningless. (It is also not new; this is the main territory of John le Carré.) The Platonic love that develops between these two men becomes critical later in history, as their situation becomes more desperate. The film creates suspense not about Oleg’s revelations – even the Cuban Missile Crisis is treated primarily as background noise – but about the increasingly co-dependent nature of the relationship between him and Greville. Each becomes the key to the other, which makes each change in your friendship much more tense.
Cumberbatch is fantastic, but the real attraction here is the great Georgian actor Ninidze, who can relay the value of an entire novel with just a few looks. At the beginning of the film, Oleg takes Greville to the ballet. There, sitting on a porch chair, is Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the man whose growing power and madness has already terrified this Soviet career officer and war hero for a life of betrayal. Oleg looks at the ogre above him with abject terror and, watching Ninidze, we can practically feel the hole opening in his stomach. Then, Oleg turns to the stage – a stage that we never really see – and his gaze begins to change, his eyes suddenly come alive with the dreamy light of a better future. The Courier it’s a useful spy drama and a history lesson, but whenever these two actors are together on the screen, it gets closer to the sublime.