Monthly Archives: December 2022

  • The Courier

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dominic Cooke (2020)

    Greville Wynne (1919-1990) was a British businessman whose trade in electrical equipment entailed regular travel to Iron Curtain countries.  In 1960 he was recruited by MI6 to courier top-secret documents between London and Moscow, where his contact was Oleg Penkovksy, a high-ranking officer in Soviet military intelligence and a double agent supplying America and Britain with information about the USSR’s intercontinental ballistic missile installations and plans.  On the evidence of this dramatisation of his story, Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) was affable and mildly eccentric; another adjective that comes to mind is clubbable – in an early scene he’s on the golf course with a couple of chums, messing up his putt.  He is, however, as a personality, an unlikely candidate for membership of the undercover fraternity that he’s leaned on to join.  This fish-out-of-water aspect is much of what makes Dominic Cooke’s film, written by Tom O’Connor, interesting.

    Yet The Courier also tries to be a straightforward Cold War thriller and though Wynne is incongruous in the world of espionage, Cooke and O’Connor don’t get – or even try to get – much ironic mileage out of the mismatch.  This is understandable:  the film had to wipe its face commercially and, handsomely shot by Sean Bobbitt, doesn’t look like a low-budget undertaking.  (Much of the location filming took place in Prague, standing in for Moscow).  Even so, you feel a sense of anti-climax each time the narrative lapses into a conventional spy drama – which is evidently what Abel Korzeniowski, who did the score, thought he was writing music for.

    Wynne was arrested in October 1962 – the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which information exchanged with Penkovsky was invaluable to the West – and held in Lubyanka prison until April 1964.  In deteriorating health, he was then released in exchange for Soviet spy Konon Molody (aka Gordon Lonsdale, mastermind of the Portland Spy Ring).  Benedict Cumberbatch is so right as the shaven-headed, emaciated Lubyanka inmate that his earlier incarnation of Wynne is suddenly made to seem like a bit of dressing up (in a sheepskin coat, a trilby and a little moustache) but his theatrical verve gives proceedings a lift throughout.  Cumberbatch’s strong performance is at least matched by Merab Ninidze’s.  This Georgian actor (whom I’d seen before only in a small role in Bridge of Spies (2015)) gives Penkovsky understated tragic gravitas.  The gradually strengthening bond between him and Wynne is believable and never overworked.

    There are two particularly good sequences at the Bolshoi Ballet, where Penkovsky takes Wynne near the start and what proves to be near the end of their association.  In the first of these, Nikita Khrushchev (Vladimir Chuprikov) is also in attendance.  Sad-eyed Merab Ninidze’s look is eloquent as Penkovsky, from his seat in the stalls, twice glances up to the theatre box where Khrushchev is ensconced.  In the second scene, the intercutting between Wynne’s and Penkovsky’s faces in the darkened auditorium and the climax to Swan Lake on the Bolshoi stage, though obvious in conception, is poignant in effect.  After his arrest, also in October 1962, Penkovsky survived only a matter of months.  Although Wikipedia refers to ‘conflicting reports about the manner of his death’ (Wynne, some years later, suggested that his friend had killed himself), text on the screen at the end of The Courier affirms the widely-held view that Penkovsky was murdered by the KGB.

    The military intelligence war-room sequences are pedestrian; it follows that the CIA/MI6 personnel (played by Rachel Brosnahan, Zeljko Ivanek, Anton Lesser and Angus Wright) are standard issue.  Vladimir Chuprikov rather overdoes Khrushchev’s notorious volatility.  The scenes of Wynne’s home life with his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley) and their young son Andrew (Keir Hills) are much more successful:  décor, dialogue and acting combine to pinpoint social milieu succinctly.  Despite a dark wig that’s too conspicuous (and unnecessary if the aim was verisimilitude:  who remembers the real Mrs Wynne’s appearance?), Jessie Buckley makes a particularly strong contribution.  A convincing middle-class wife of the time, she’s also affecting when Sheila learns from MI6 visitors the true reason for her husband’s secretive behaviour (she had suspected another woman, Greville having played away before).  Keir Hills is also good as the intelligent, worried Andrew and his looks make him believable as Benedict Cumberbatch’s son.  A marked improvement on Dominic Cooke’s previous feature, On Chesil Beach (2017), The Courier keeps falling between two stools but it’s a decent film.  The main actors make their characters and what drives them matter.

    3 December 2022

  • She Said

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Maria Schrader (2022)

    In Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist (1988), the mournful hero’s world is transformed by the love of a dog trainer, whom he meets through Edward, his badly-behaved Welsh corgi.  (The trainer transforms the dog, too.)  Pauline Kael, noting Edward’s absence from the film’s closing stages, wrote that the corgi had ‘gone the way of Hollywood dogs who have outlived their plot function’.  In the opening sequence of She Said – somewhere in Ireland, in the 1990s – a teenage girl walks her dog through woodland, then on a beach.  A film crew shooting further along the beach catches the girl’s attention and she approaches them.  By the time she reaches the crew, there’s no sign of the dog – or that the girl is bothered there’s no sign of the dog.  Maria Schrader has revived a Hollywood tradition in what may be record time.

    This careless start is uncharacteristic of She Said, a conscientious, competent reconstruction of events in 2017 leading up to the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct by New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey.  Yet Schrader’s film, despite its important subject, isn’t much more than reconstruction.  The screenplay by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida (2013), Disobedience (2017), Colette (2018)), adapted from Kantor and Twohey’s 2019 book of the same title, simply describes what happens and lacks dramatic substance.  Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015), another record of determined, true-life journalistic efforts to expose a sexual abuse scandal, was also thinly textured but had more impact than She Said for two main reasons.  First, the specific location:  McCarthy enlivened the Boston Globe’s investigation into child sex abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in the Boston archdiocese by illustrating social connections (and worse) across the city’s press, priesthood and police.  Second, because the resulting story didn’t make (and continue to make) international headlines – unlike the fall of Weinstein and the related rise of #MeToo.

    Maria Schrader relies on a capable cast, headed by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan, to flesh out their underwritten characters.  The actors duly oblige but to counterproductive effect:  you want to know more about the people they’re playing and you never do.  The personal lives of Kantor (Kazan) and Twohey (Mulligan) are dealt with perfunctorily – even the work-life (im)balance thread is unusually slender.  While that’s no great loss, the lack of follow-up to Megan’s psychological struggle following the birth of her first child, is.  Carey Mulligan compels belief in the ‘terrible sense of dread’ Megan claims to be feeling (a dread that’s evidently nothing to do with the systemic sexual abuse of women in Hollywood).  When Megan mentions this to her, Jodi, who has two young daughters, recalls her own post-partum depression.  That’s all it takes for Megan to snap out of hers and get on with the job in hand.

    Something similar happens in relation to some of the journalists’ interviews.  At the Venice Film Festival in 1998, Weinstein tried to rape Rowena Chiu, one of his assistants at Miramax; she subsequently signed, and abided by, a non-disclosure agreement.  Jodi Kantor visits Chiu’s home in California; Rowena isn’t there but Kantor talks with her husband – briefly but long enough for it to be clear he knows nothing of his wife’s traumatic past.  In his couple of minutes on screen, the actor concerned (Edward Astor Chin) is expressive enough to get you wondering what happened when Rowena’s husband raised the matter with her; you just keep wondering, of course.  Megan Twohey calls on John Schmidt (John Mazurek), a Miramax executive responsible for drawing up NDAs.  The anxious, furtive look Schmidt gives his wife (the role is uncredited on IMDb) is intriguing but, once Twohey leaves their house, the Schmidts aren’t seen again.  The subplot involving Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle) – another of Weinstein’s ex-assistants/victims and the twenty-years-on version of the absent-minded Irish dogwalker (Lola Petticrew) at the start – is uncomfortable in a different way.   While it’s true that Laura Madden underwent breast cancer surgery in England just around the time Kantor and Twohey’s story was being prepared for publication, Maria Schrader’s staging is crude, verging on tasteless:  Madden is on the phone, agreeing to go public about Weinstein, just as she’s about to be wheeled into theatre.

    Only once does an actor in the film for a single scene register so strongly that their character’s episode feels complete in itself.  Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), Rowena Chiu’s colleague, accompanied her and Weinstein to Venice.  Perkins recalls what happened when Perkins meets with Kantor in a London teashop.  Samantha Morton (who also does plenty with her skinny role in The Whale) impressively conveys the woman’s controlled anger; you can see the layers of bitterness that have settled on her over the course of two decades.  Perkins’s cynicism is deep-seated yet she’s quietly exultant at now getting the opportunity to talk.  Schrader inserts flashbacks to Venice, where the younger Zelda (Molly Windsor) tries to comfort distraught Rowena (Ashley Chiu); these are surplus to requirements, thanks to Morton’s power.  Zelda Perkins leaves the teashop.  Jodi watches her walk away down the street.  Job done, all round.

    There are other pluses.  Schrader and Lenkiewicz do well to include a virtual prologue, set in autumn 2016, about Megan Twohey’s attempts to bring Donald Trump to book through the testimony of women claiming sexual harassment or abuse by him.  She Said doesn’t stress the relative failure of those attempts and doesn’t need to.  We know the revelations didn’t prevent Trump’s election as President just a few weeks later:  the context of this film makes that shocking all over again.   It’s also worthwhile hearing Twohey later express a worry that focusing on Hollywood runs the risk of overlooking victims of abuse in less high-profile workplaces.  She Said isn’t well placed to allay such concerns but at least it acknowledges them.  Although she’s now in her late thirties, Zoe Kazan has an earnest schoolgirl quality that makes her Jodi Kantor distinctive.  She and Carey Mulligan play with real commitment – and without the self-approval that roles like Kantor and Twohey might have brought out in lesser actresses.  As New York Times editors, Andre Braugher and Patricia Clarkson manage to breathe life into their characters.

    Harvey Weinstein (Mike Houston) features mainly as an angry voice on the telephone, though his sinister bulk is also seen occasionally, in backview.  (Trump is only a belligerent telephone voice, supplied by James Austin Johnson.)  Kelly McQuail voices Rose McGowan and Gwyneth Paltrow herself.  It was a good decision to get Ashley Judd, whose naming of Weinstein in October 2017 gave significant impetus to Kantor and Twohey’s exposé, to play herself in the film:  Judd’s appearance on the screen gives weight to She Said as an account of Hollywood history.  But none of the film’s strengths is enough to sustain it above the level of diligent retelling of a tale that’s well known.  In Ursula McFarlane’s documentary Untouchable (2019), which has screened on BBC, the talking heads include Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, as well as Ronan Farrow (whose Weinstein exposé in the New Yorker appeared at virtually the same time as the New York Times‘s) and some of the victims with whom the journalists talked.  She Said arrives in cinemas only five years on from the events it describes but already too late.  We seem to have heard it all before and Maria Schrader doesn’t try to show us more.

    1 December 2022

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