The new
historical drama thriller The Courier
starring Benedict Cumberbatch represents not only the third British
intelligence thriller prominently featuring the actor (the other two being Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Imitation Game), it also posits the
actor recently seen in the prison drama The
Mauritanian on the other side of the fence as a prisoner himself at one
point. The true story of British
businessman Greville Wynne who with Soviet agent Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze)
smuggled out top secret information including but not limited to revealing the
Cuban Missile crisis, theater director turned filmmaker Dominic Cooke’s The Courier is the tale of their efforts
and their mutual ordeals suffered once they were discovered by the KGB.
While
the film’s director is somewhat of a newcomer to the silver screen, the story
and setting are familiar grounds for Cumberbatch though much is being made in
the press of the actor’s weight loss for the project. Cumberbatch has proven time and time again he’s
fully committed to his art and has been a force for bringing historical dramas
concerning real personages to life on the silver screen. His latest film The Courier joins
Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies as a film concerning an English-speaking
figure tasked with infiltrating the Soviet Union with equal time given to dramatize
the central hero’s respective ordeals.
Visually
the film is handsomely composed by Steve McQueen’s regular cinematographer Sean
Bobbitt who through McQueen’s work hasn’t been a stranger to turning his
cameras on human endurances. Unique to
the piece is Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski’s evocative score. A former understudy of the great late Polish
composer Krzysztof Penderecki, the score for The Courier is at once
traditional in tone but experimental in form.
Performances across the board are strong though this is mostly
Cumberbatch’s show. That said, actor
Merad Ninidze as Greville’s partner Oleg Penkovsky codenamed Ironbark gives an
equally powerful performance. As fate
would have it, Ninidze also appeared in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies as a
Soviet interrogator.
Yes the
film is somewhat of an old fashioned historical drama programmer and I’m
willing to bet Cumberbatch is likely to produce more projects like this in the
future but as always the film’s heart is in the right place and Cumberbatch
gives his all to the film physically as well as emotionally. At
times this can be a draining viewing experience but Cumberbatch gives the
subject and film immediacy and manages to make you share with Greville’s
accomplishments and subsequent ordeal. Having
seen him recently in The Mauritanian, the actor continues to cement his
place in the cinematic landscape as one of its most important and gifted contributors
who shows no signs of slowing down.
--Andrew Kotwicki
