Un espion ordinaire

The most important American asset in Russia during the Cold War. The movie does not nearly do enough justice to Oleg Penkovsky's contributions to the US and the UK. A quick read up on the net helps do justice to both Oleg Penkovsky and Greville Wynne.

Still, The Courier is a solid production. Most notable is Benedict Cumberbatch's dedicated performance, including the drastic changes to his body weight. Merab Ninidze also does a splendid job.

Of course, real life spy work is less like Hollywood action movies... so there's just a lot of taking photos on small cameras and passing packages around. You won't get a lot of close call James Bond type action scenes. So the actual exciting bit was describing the precautions to spy work. Articulating what goes behind the scenes of seemingly unnoticeable spy work was appreciated. But that was pretty short.

The Courier also tries to be a little too ambitious. I don't know if the final act was necessary. Obviously, it showcased Cumberbatch's acting skills the most. However, it did seem like an entirely different movie.

Finally, the homage to good patriotic work is appreciated. Hard to diss two heroes, and glad I could know more about the folks who risk their lives in the shadows to protect us.

The Courier (2020) is an English movie directed by Dominic Cooke. The film takes place during the height of the Cold War.

It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, a middle-class mid-level British business man. Oleg Penkovsky, portrayed by Mereb Ninindze, is a high-ranking Soviet official who knows that there's a real chance of nuclear war.

British intelligence recruits Wynne to make a connection with Penkovsky. His job will be to bring back important information that will help the western powers. Rachel Brosnahan portrays a U. S. CIA agent who is working with British intelligence.

The film succeeds or fails on the work of Cumberbatch. He's a superb actor, and the movie falls into place on the basis of his acting. (In fairness, he's such a competent actor that I had a little trouble accepting him as a less-than-competent businessman.) Ninindze does good work, but I had trouble accepting Brosnahan as a CIA agent. (Mrs. Maisel, yes. CIA, no.) For the record, I also had trouble with the basic assumption that the CIA agents were the good guys.

This movie provides an intense, claustrophobic experience. It's very well done, but at the other end of the spectrum from James Bond spy movies. We saw this film on the small screen, where it worked well. It has a barely adequate IMDb rating of 7.1. I thought that it was better than that, and rated it 8.

It was the early 1960s, the USA and Russia were in a race to amass nuclear weapons. It was to the point that if both of them did a maximum launch at each other it would destroy most of the world as we knew it. In truth they wanted to bury each other.

In October 1962 I was a senior in high school and that is the month of an event that came to be called the Cuban missile crisis. Russia decided to move nuclear missiles to Cuba, just a few miles off the coast of the USA. There was nothing favorable about that move. The still new US President JFK had a tough decision, how to confront Russia and get them to reverse their plans. As history witnessed Russia backed off.

That is a central theme in the story here, based on real people and real events. An English businessman was convinced to expand his business dealings to Russia, there he would befriend a Russian who would pass him photographic microfilm. He became the courier. A main topic were the plans to place the missiles in Cuba. This spy work was what tipped England and the USA off to the Russian plans and allowed them to monitor the situation which eventually resulted in the confrontation to get Russian ships to turn back.

This is a very good movie, well-acted and well-told. My wife and watched it streaming on Amazon.

Edit July 2023: Watching it again, it is such a well-made and well-acted movie you can watch it every year or two and still enjoy it as much as the first time.

Real life stories can be tricky. In the horror genre they can fail miserably ... in the War scenarios or spy and real people stories, it does look differently though. Like with this one. And while I reckon one could argue that side characters feel shallow or one dimensional (the wives for example), I'd argue there is not enough time to get and have everyone have their moment.

Still the British wife we have here, does have some zingers and you can really feel her pain and understand her anxiety over all that is happening. Even if she has the wrong idea of what is going on. Having said all that, the actors are fantastic and the tension is really holding up throughout ... you may know where this is going (and what happened with Cuba and the missilie crisis), but it won't take anything away from what we see on screen.

A surprisingly good watch, with it being nice to see Mr Cumberbatch in a role that isn't a Marvel green screen epic.

I recommend this film.