The Courier
Directed by: Dominic Cooke
Written by: Tom O'Conner
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley, Angus Wright, Richard Glaves, Anton Lesser, Vladimir Chuprikov, Maria Mirinova, Keir Hills
Thriller - 111 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 16 Mar 2021
Written by: Tom O'Conner
Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley, Angus Wright, Richard Glaves, Anton Lesser, Vladimir Chuprikov, Maria Mirinova, Keir Hills
Thriller - 111 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 16 Mar 2021
If MI6 recruited Benedict Cumberbatch because he drank too much, was a bit overweight, and was a convincing general schlub, what chance do the rest of us have? He still looks like fit Cumberbatch. The best modern Sherlock Holmes is no stranger to cinematic World Wars nor spy skullduggery. Cumberbatch played World War I officers in War Horse and 1917 and ur-Sheldon Cooper as Alan Turing in the World War II timeframe The Imitation Game. He even helped smoke out a mole at the top of British intelligence in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Our boy Benedict can act his way around a battlefield and a briefing room, but can he convince his wife he’s not cheating her, he just has to to Moscow a whole bunch smack in the middle of the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis and try and prevent World War III.
Cumberbatch (The Mauritanian) plays Greville Wynne, a London-based businessman with the most British-sounding name since Benedict Cumberbatch. Wynne has contacts and contracts in eastern Europe; therefore, MI6 and the CIA believe he has the bona fides to travel to Moscow to meet a prospective source. The possible informant is Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidzc), the chief of a Scientific Committee who also maintains unfettered access to the Soviet Union’s most sensitive nuclear secrets.
Cumberbatch (The Mauritanian) plays Greville Wynne, a London-based businessman with the most British-sounding name since Benedict Cumberbatch. Wynne has contacts and contracts in eastern Europe; therefore, MI6 and the CIA believe he has the bona fides to travel to Moscow to meet a prospective source. The possible informant is Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidzc), the chief of a Scientific Committee who also maintains unfettered access to the Soviet Union’s most sensitive nuclear secrets.
Director Dominic Cooke fashioned a fish out of water story “based on true events”. Wynne is both perfect for the mission and severely untrained and amateurish. He’s a terrible liar. His wife, Sheila (Jessie Buckley, I'm Thinking of Ending Things), knows about the one time he stepped out on her. Wynne’s chief MI6 handler (Angus Wright, The Iron Lady) also feels Wynne is too skittish for the assignment, but is more or less strong-armed by the Americans, led by the CIA’s Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan, The Finest Hours). Wynne’s presence is secured when Penkovsky takes a shine to him. The Brit is goofy enough to evade the KGB’s attention.
Penkovsky sees Secretary Kruschev as an impulsive buffoon who should be nowhere near nuclear weapon codes. The apparatchik doesn’t chafe against the limitations and corruption inherent in the Soviet communist state, but his fear of accidental, or worse, ignorant, nuclear annihilation weighs on his conscience. Wynne and Penkovsky develop a genuine rapport with each other. They both cherish their small families and are proud at how well they can hold their liquor. The Courier’s most effective scenes are not the cat and mouse schemes meant to quicken the audience’s collective pulses; rather, they are the intimate settings where Penkovsky has dinner with the Wynnes and when Greville meets Oleg’s family in a park. They are politically foreign, but also humans who understand what’s really important.
The script by Tom O’Conner, the man behind The Hitman’s Bodyguard, seems to fill in the cracks of other movie Cuban Missile Crisis plots, notably Thirteen Days with Kevin Costner, but most clearly brings to mind Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies. Even though that film was more Berlin focused and more legal thriller than spy tradecraft-centric, the same hesitant understanding occurs between the protagonists. Their respective political leaders may bloviate and demonize the “other” as what’s wrong with the world, but these are two men sharing smokes and vodka. They see past the rhetoric and into each other’s humanity.
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