The Cold War provided as much ammunition for fiction as any battlefield. For the global superpowers, the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the world was a chessboard whose bishops and rooks were the nations in their orbit. Potential traitors lurked in every embassy and foreign ministry, motivated by idealism or greed to betray their side.
The spy novel-film is the genre par excellence for exploring the psychology of the Cold Warriors. The field has been thoroughly harvested, and while The Courier (streaming on Amazon Prime) yields nothing new, the story is inspired by facts and remains engaging throughout courtesy of Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role.
Cumberbatch plays Greville Wynne, the British businessman recruited by MI6 as the go-between with Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a ranking Soviet intelligence officer with access to state secrets. One of those secrets nearly led to nuclear war—his revelation of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s plan to mount missiles in Cuba. As a result of the documents he passes to Wynne (their contents confirmed by U2 overflights), the Kennedy administration threw a blockade around the island and dared Khrushchev to cross it. The Soviets backed down.
Cumberbatch’s Wynne is an affable cynic and gladhander, a reluctant recruit as a spy who forms a genuine friendship with Penkovsky. Wynne and Penkovsky were real but the film’s third player, Emily Donovan, is not. Rachel Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) has the hopeless task of playing an anachronism, a top female CIA agent in the early ‘60s with influence in the corridors of power. Of greater believability are the more genuinely felt performances by Wynne’s wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), who suspects he’s having an affair on his trips to Moscow (she’s kept in the dark about his mission); and Penkovsky’s wife Vera (Maria Mironova), who likewise knows nothing of her husband’s spying for the U.K. The Donovan character seems false, shoehorned into the plot as a U.S. box-office move to add a recognizable female star and inject America into what was a British enterprise.
In The Courier, Wynne and Penkovsky develop a touching comradeship that tests the bonds of friendship forged on old-fashioned ideas of loyalty. Ninidze invests Penkovsky with regret and determination. A Russian patriot who keeps a poker face when confronted by bellicose Kremlin rhetoric, he sees Khrushchev as chaotic, impulsive and idiotic—an unstable man with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Cumberbatch stretches his range in the film’s final third as Wynne, beaten and tortured by the KGB, hangs together by loose threads.
British director Dominic Cooke moves The Courier along at a breathless pace and captures the nervous rhythm of anxiety in Soviet society where privacy is unlikely and surveillance pervasive. The contrast between London and Moscow sets the tone. Britain’s capital is awash with motion and colorful neon. Moscow is static and grey, flecked by an occasional dash of red, and dominated by looming portraits of Lenin.
