#The courier movie pro
While there’s decent work from Brosnahan, a pro now with the era after three seasons of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, and some understated character acting from Ninidze, it’s really a showcase for Cumberbatch, also acting as producer. She has some solid enough emoting to do here but it’s a token wife role, the kind I hope she won’t need to do within a few more years. It’s a film of broadly sketched relationships, shown also in the specificity-free marriage between Greville and Sheila, played by Jessie Buckley, a wonderful actor most recently underused quite criminally in Dolittle. It’s Ironbark’s key emotional connection but screenwriter Tom O’Connor, whose main credit is cliched action comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard, can’t quite force us into investing in them as a pair. It’s a timely concept but the underdeveloped bond between Greville and Alex failed to grab me with quite the force that the film-makers seem to think that it should, given where the plot takes them and us. It’s a slow-burning film about the friendship that then blossoms between these two men as they routinely risk their lives for the greater good and there’s an earnest, well-intentioned message about wider political change starting on a smaller scale. Through an old connection, Dickie comes up with Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), who accepts the offer without truly understanding just what he’s let himself in for. In need of someone to help courier his leaks yet concerned that someone within the intelligence community would be too conspicuous, CIA official Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan) and MI6 agent Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) hatch a plan to use a businessman as a cover, one without any experience within the intelligence community. Hope then comes from an unlikely source: Soviet military intelligence colonel Oleg aka Alex Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) who decides to turn against his country in order to help stop a new war. CIA operatives are thin on the ground in Moscow and the Americans have grown impatient for intel.
It’s the early 60s and tensions between the US and the Soviet Union are threatening to explode into nuclear conflict. At times this threatens to depersonalise the film, to add it to a list of respectfully made yet mostly indistinguishable period potboilers but the story at its centre is such a fascinating one that theatre director Dominic Cooke just about manages to keep its head above water. Its closest sibling would be Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies while its straightforward, risk-free storytelling also recalls a great many prestige British dramas.
It tells the kind of true story that film-makers crave, the kind that exists on the periphery of a major historical event, switching its focus to a more human angle.
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