The tallest building in Moscow, goes the old Soviet joke, is the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (known by its Russian acronym, the FSB) — because you can see Siberia from its basement.
It’s a place that looms over “The Courier,” an affable if slight dramatic thriller about two spies who tried to avert the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. They were a British businessman, Greville Wynne (played here by Benedict Cumberbatch), and his source, Oleg Penkovsky (played by Merab Ninidze), the heroic military intelligence service colonel who fed information about Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba to MI6 during the Cold War. The latter is sometimes referred to — and not unreasonably — as “The Spy Who Saved the World.”
It’s mostly, though, a movie about the panopticon of mid-century Moscow, where anyone from the taxi driver to the old lady manning the front desk at your hotel might be secretly in the pay of the KGB, and also one about the urgency, to people of principle, of peace.
It is a touch too optimistic.
Dramatically, Wynne is, of course, a more interesting figure to us than Penkovsky.
“The Courier” is also practically an encyclopedia of spy movie conventions, some enjoyable and some a little played out: There are fun 1960s spy gadgets, including a secret compartment in a can of shaving cream and secret cameras used to photograph classified documents. There are scenes of people furtively handing crumpled manila envelopes to each other, others of people putting their hands in apparent strangers’ pockets, still others being people bundled into cars against their wills, of them racing to airports, and of them gaining access to the guarded U.S. embassy by announcing that they are American. There’s even a climactic performance of “Swan Lake” by the Bolshoi Ballet.
It is, generously, the second-best Cold War movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch based on a true story of betrayal at MI6. (The first is Tomas Alfredson’s masterly adaptation of the John Le Carré’s novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”)
The director of “The Courier,” Dominic Cooke, is a veteran of U.K. theater, and his movie’s visual style is, like much of U.K. theater and nearly everything about this movie, steeped in comfortable cliché. But the performances Cooke elicits from his main players are very much worth watching.
When the movie’s focus leaves behind its cartoonish versions of Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev and his murderous flunkies — there is also better recent movie about him, Armando Iannuci’s awesome farce “The Death of Stalin” — and focuses instead on the alliance between Wynne and Penkovsky, it gives the audience something unique and interesting. Two men who barely know each other except through shared peril discover that they also share a desperate need to avert another war, through which they become allies, then friends and then the only thing in each other’s lives.
When the movie leaves behind its cartoonish versions of Kruschev and his flunkies and focuses on Wynne and Penkovsky, it gives the audience something unique.
It’s a moving conceit, made all the better by the movie’s shocking third act (which is only shocking if you don't already know the story). Unlike most heroic spy flicks, this one has a long section that takes place in the aforementioned Lubyanka; that bit is, for the first time in this movie, uncharted territory.
This story has been adapted a few times before — by Penkovsky’s biographers, by the BBC after its two successful Le Carré adaptations, and by Wynne himself, who wrote two books that made a little freer than was necessary with the facts of his adventures as a spy.
Dramatically, Wynne is, of course, a more interesting figure to us: a salesman who didn’t rise above the rank of private in World War II, suddenly pressed into service to his country carrying nuclear secrets to and fro at the height of the Cold War.
But in real life, it’s Penkovsky who was the hero, first risking his safety to contact American spies and then sacrificing everything for the hope of a better life for his family. Spies or intelligence officers working under nonofficial cover — those who we might call "double agents" but their agencies would call traitors — are fascinating: They have to work two jobs, one to maintain deniability and one to serve their agency. But they are not always the brightest bulbs in the chandelier; consider Aldrich Ames, the Russian mole inside the CIA who raised suspicion by paying more than half a million dollars cash for his house on his $60,000-a-year agency salary.
By the 1960’s it was very clear that the totalitarian omniscience of the USSR was making both that country and the wider world a worse place.
Russian spycraft, though, has always exceeded the efforts of its American and British peers; one reason that Le Carré in particular is such an effective narrator on the topic is his intense cynicism, informed by the genuine treason that formed the basis of “Tinker Tailor.” Pervading “The Courier,” too, is the feeling that anyone, anywhere, might be willing to turn our heroes into the authorities out of a sense of patriotism, fear for their own families, or simple avarice.
And that paranoia is not fantasy: Contemporary leftists like to joke about the glories of the Soviet Union, but by the 1960s it was very clear that the totalitarian omniscience of the USSR was making both that country and the wider world a worse place. It was a misery that stuck in the craw of Kim Philby, the man who betrayed Le Carré to the Russians. "Kim believed in a just society and devoted his whole life to communism,” his wife, Rufina Pukhova, said in an interview some years after his death. “And [in the USSR] he was struck by disappointment, brought to tears. He said, 'Why do old people live so badly here? After all, they won the war.'"
That kind of disillusionment is one anyone who loves their country must suffer, at least a little bit; Le Carré felt it, which is why his work rings so true. Disillusionment is, however, a quality left out of “The Courier,” which seems simply to believe that the West is correct and the USSR was wrong. And the question of why the citizens of a supposedly egalitarian society must suffer so unnecessarily is, unfortunately, timeless and without nationality.
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