Photo: Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the based-on-real-events spy movie "The Courier." (Photo/Lionsgate)
Movie review: "The Courier," directed by Dominic Cooke, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, RachelBrosnahan, Jessie Buckley. Streaming on Amazon Prime.
In any listing of great spy films, you’re bound to find works based on the novels of John le Carré. From 1965’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” to the various adaptations of le Carré’s George Smiley novels – especially the 1979 BBC miniseries “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” – le Carré created the standard by which all other studies of espionage are compared.
One film that doesn’t live up to that comparison is “The Courier,” directed by Dominic Cooke and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. That said, Cooke’s film – which is based on real events – does have its share of thrilling moments.
Based on the actual experiences of British businessman Greville Wynne, the film portrays the nearly two years, beginning in the fall of 1960, that Wynne transported top-secret information between the Soviet official Oleg Penkovsky (played by Georgian actor Merab Ninidze) and the British security agency MI6. It also captures the unfortunate aftermath.
From that simple scenario, director Cooke – working from a screenplay by Tom O’Connor – concocts a story that is fairly and efficiently straightforward, even if it does take the usual movieland dips into dramatic indulgence.
The real Wynne, who in 1960 was 41, traveled regularly throughout Eastern Europe as a sale representative for various British companies. Thinking that Wynne’s business pursuits would provide him the perfect cover for espionage, an MI6 agent approached him and appealed to his patriotism.
As those of us who lived through that period are aware, it was a time of nuclear tension, with the United States facing off against the Soviet Union and all of Europe caught in between. As things heated up during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the secrets that Penkovsky was willing to divulge were considered of paramount importance. Thus the need for Wynne.
In Cooke’s film, Wynne is approached not just by MI6 but also by an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (played by Rachel Brosnahan). Though the information that Penkovsky provided – by one report some 111 rolls of film and 10,000 pages of intelligence reports – was used both by the U.S. and Britain, Brosnahan’s character is a fictional composite of several different people. So all the scenes featuring her, conferring with Wynne, with MI6 officials and even her own CIA superiors, are dramatizations.
Furthermore, to create tension, Wynne is shown being arrested while waiting for his airplane to take off – a departure from what really occurred, his merely being hustled into a van while on a business trip to Budapest. Even more achingly dramatic is a scene where Wynne meets up with Penkovsky in prison and is able to let him know that his sacrifice – his career, his marriage and, ultimately his life – had not been in vain.
What “The Courier” does offer is respectable acting. The talented and versatile Cumberbatch, as capable of playing Shakespeare as he is the Marvel Comics character Doctor Strange, is solid as Wynne. Ninidze, who was featured in the 2017 Hungarian film “Jupiter’s Moon” – which played at the 2019 Spokane International Film Festival – is his match as Penkovsky.
Even the American actress Brosnahan, an Emmy Award winner for the Amazon Studios series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” holds her own – no small feat – against her British and European castmates. Less effective is Jessie Buckley, whose own talents are sorely underused in the role of Wynne’s long-suffering wife.
Director Cooke deserves credit for his ability maintain a sense of tension despite the fact that anyone with Internet access can look up what happened. Then again, that’s largely because so much of his movie was fabricated – just as Wynne, ended up fabricating so many things in a couple of memoirs.
Wynne, though had an excuse: For the rest of his life he suffered from the effects of his 18-month stint in a Russian prison. By contrast, Cooke and his crew were just trying to make a movie.
Give me the work of John le Carré any day. His fiction feels more real than reality itself.
An edited version of this review was broadcast previously on Spokane Public Radio.
