A spy story worth seeing in theaters and an actor convincingly real.
The Courier
"Maybe don't say Oleg. It sounds bad in English." Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze)
And so it goes sometimes lightly in a heavy-duty spy drama set in the cold war of the early ‘60’s. The beauty of The Courier, based on a true story, is that its traditional depiction of spy antics (most recently a similar Bridge of Spies) is peppered with lighter moments and balanced with serious decisions that carry no blood but suggest nuclear war.
Unless England and the US can contain the growingly dangerous USSR premier Nikita Krushchev (Vladimir Chuprikov), the world could be destroyed by the arms of either country. Enter a mild-mannered businessman, Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is recruited by the US to become a spy during his trips to Russia.
While his increasingly fraught actions are getting the attention of the KGB, he makes a close friendship with his Russian counterpart, Oleg (Merab Ninidze), who has decided to spy for the allies out of fear of Krushchev and Russia’s increasingly bellicose posture, crystallized by the impending Cuban missile crisis.
Although the audience knows the story of the crisis, it does not know how the growing friendship between Greville and Oleg will direct their individual fates. The strength of The Courier is it works out the thesis, stated early, that personal relationships have the potential to change history or bring peace at the very least.
As always, Cumberbatch is an eminently watchable actor. Like Christian Bale in The Machinist, Cumberbatch physically transforms himself into looking like a concentration camp prisoner. In fact, production stopped for three months to allow him to lose the weight.
In its favor, the film has few if any tricky surprises (for instance, a bad guy surfacing among good ones), no digital tools to amaze, and no screaming spouses, to name a few. The Courier is balm for an imprisoned COVID population especially if the audience has gone back to theaters, where its love of spy stories began.
"Maybe don't say Oleg. It sounds bad in English." Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze)
And so it goes sometimes lightly in a heavy-duty spy drama set in the cold war of the early ‘60’s. The beauty of The Courier, based on a true story, is that its traditional depiction of spy antics (most recently a similar Bridge of Spies) is peppered with lighter moments and balanced with serious decisions that carry no blood but suggest nuclear war.
Unless England and the US can contain the growingly dangerous USSR premier Nikita Krushchev (Vladimir Chuprikov), the world could be destroyed by the arms of either country. Enter a mild-mannered businessman, Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is recruited by the US to become a spy during his trips to Russia.
While his increasingly fraught actions are getting the attention of the KGB, he makes a close friendship with his Russian counterpart, Oleg (Merab Ninidze), who has decided to spy for the allies out of fear of Krushchev and Russia’s increasingly bellicose posture, crystallized by the impending Cuban missile crisis.
Although the audience knows the story of the crisis, it does not know how the growing friendship between Greville and Oleg will direct their individual fates. The strength of The Courier is it works out the thesis, stated early, that personal relationships have the potential to change history or bring peace at the very least.
As always, Cumberbatch is an eminently watchable actor. Like Christian Bale in The Machinist, Cumberbatch physically transforms himself into looking like a concentration camp prisoner. In fact, production stopped for three months to allow him to lose the weight.
In its favor, the film has few if any tricky surprises (for instance, a bad guy surfacing among good ones), no digital tools to amaze, and no screaming spouses, to name a few. The Courier is balm for an imprisoned COVID population especially if the audience has gone back to theaters, where its love of spy stories began.
The Courier
Director: Dominic Cooke (On Chesil Beach)
Screenplay: Tom O’Connor (The Hitman’s Bodyguard)
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game)
Run Time: 1h 52 min
Rating: PG-13
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
