The Courier
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