Dominic Cooke – Movie Musings

True-life Cold War thrills, as two spies battle to prevent the Cuban Missile crisis

Director: Dominic Cooke

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch (Greville Wynne), Merab Ninidze (Oleg Penkovsky), Rachel Brosnahan (Helen Talbot), Jessie Buckley (Shelia Wynne), Angus Wright (Dickie Franks), Željko Ivanek (John McClone), Kirill Pirogov (Oleg Gribanov), Anton Lesser (Bertrand), Maria Mironova (Vera)

In October 1962 the world nearly ended, as the USA and the USSR clashed over Soviet missiles in Cuba. The history of this grim month is well known, as the fate of the world hung in the balance. What’s less known is the role Soviet double agent Oleg Penkovsky played in passing information on Soviet capabilities and strategy to the West – and how crucial this was to bringing the crisis to a (world-surviving) end.

The Courier covers – in a pleasingly old-fashioned, Le Carré-ish way – Penkovsky’s (Merab Ninidze) dangerous espionage career, and the relationship he built with British businessman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch). Wynne – totally unconnected to the Secret Services – was chosen by MI6 to make initial contact with Penkovsky. He then served as Penkovsky’s courier, carrying secret documents and microfilm back to the West under cover of business trips to the Soviet Union – and the two men became close friends. When the Cuban Missile Crisis increases the risks to Penkovsky, it’s Wynne who pushes for a risky mission to extract him before he is uncovered and killed.

Directed with confident, low-key aplomb by Dominic Cooke, The Courier mixes shady, spy-thriller tropes (secret meetings, scratched signals, one-time pads, secret cameras) with a genuine friendship between two very different people. All taking place in a grim, Soviet environment where the risk of discovery lurks around every corner. Ordinary receptionists and chauffeurs could all be active or potential informants of the KGB, and there is not a single room that cannot be bugged.

It’s a very unusual world fish-out-of-water Wynne finds himself in. Expertly played by Cumberbatch as a stiff-necked people-pleasing fixer (introduced deliberately losing a game of golf to close a business deal with the triumphant winners), Wynne uncovers depths he didn’t suspect in himself. He at first has no interest in spying – or the Soviet Union – and simply wants a quiet life rebuilding trust with his wife (Jessie Buckley making a great deal of a rather thankless part of a woman kept in the dark about her husband’s activities) after a past affair.

He needs brow-beating from MI6 to even carry out his first mission – which he executes with a nervy unease – and reacts with horror at the idea of repeating it. What draws him in is the same quality that will see him take huge risks: his sense of humanity and fair play and the bond of mutual friendship and understanding between him and Penkovsky. Wynne willingly accepts dangers and sacrifices others would blanche at, out of loyalty and a sharply defined sense of right and wrong.

Wonderfully played by Ninidze, The Courier makes clear the huge risks Penkovsky is taking even considering talking to the West. This is a country where a Western spy is executed in the middle of a special staff meeting at his ministry. Whose leader is hell-bent on asserting Russian dominance and devil-take the consequences (sound familiar?). A country taking part in an arms race that could destroy the world, and disregarding the risks that could lead to those weapons being used. A quiet, loving family man, Penkovsky is appalled at the aggressive posturing of his country and how it is endangering his family and millions like them around the world.

It’s the bond between these two men, their sense of duty and their desire to protect, their quiet wit and small acts of thoughtfulness – as well as their capacity for betrayal (Penkovsky of his country, Wynne of his wife) – that draws them together. For Wynne, the selfless risks of Penkovksy create a deep well of respect and admiration, as well as pushing this businessman to develop into a justified-risk-taking moralist with a greater emotional connection to the beauty of life (represented by two contrasting scenes showing the two of them attending a Russian ballet – the second performance moves them both to tears, as if reminding them why they fight).

Around them, shot in a beautifully drained out style that really adds to the sense of terror and danger, plays out a sharp, well-paced spy thriller. Rachel Brosnahan plays Penkovsky’s CIA handler – an invented female agent, allowing the film to take a few shots at the stuffed-shirt unimaginativeness of her superiors – while Angus Wright (all stiff realpolitik) is his MI6 one. The official agencies play a more pragmatic bat, pushing Penkovsky to greater-and-greater calculated risks to improve their access. They also coldly accept any double agent has only a limited shelf-life before discovery, and getting the maximum out of them while they can is essential.

The film’s final act explores the impact of this, as Penkovsky is exposed and Wynne goes to dangerous lengths to try and help him escape. Shifting at this point into something more claustrophobic and hand-held, the film’s final act layers on the grim suffering spies face when uncovered – and includes several moments of genuinely moving suffering.

The Courier is a low-key, efficient, well-made and well-paced true-life espionage story, that feels like the professional, smartly assembled, film-making that often gets squeezed out of cinemas today. Very well acted by a strong cast, every frame has a perfect mixture of 50s/60s style and Cold War paranoia and its final sequence carries a decent emotional punch. A fine retelling of an overlooked story.

Billy Howle and Saoirse Ronan share a disastrous wedding night in On Chesil Beach

Director: Dominic Cooke

Cast: Saoirse Ronan (Florence Ponting), Billy Howle (Edward Mayhew), Emily Watson (Violet Ponting), Anne-Marie Duff (Marjorie Mayhew), Samuel West (Geoffrey Ponting), Adrian Scarborough (Lionel Mayhew), Anton Lesser (Reverend Woollett), Tamara Lawrence (Molly)

There are few things sadder than the road not taken. And few novels capture the tragedy of a single moment in time shaping a whole life’s course better than Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. This slim novella starts as a romance but quickly collapses into a tragedy – and this film adaptation, adapted beautifully by McEwan, hums with a constant sense of sadness and gloom.

Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) is a middle-class boy and would-be historian who falls in love with promising violin player Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) in 1962, after they both graduate from their respective universities with first class degrees. But their wedding night is a disaster – Edward is in tune with the swinging sixties and flushed with sexual desire, Florence is still living with the values of the 1950s and extremely uncomfortable with sex (possibly connected to a past relationship with her domineering father, expertly played by Samuel West). A conversation on Chesil beach leads to a ruinous split – and for Edward a life of regret.

On Chesil Beach is a film that expertly demonstrates contrasts – between the oppressive 1950s and the more bohemian 1960s (sexual freedom, socialism, nuclear disarmament), and the skilful use of the rock ‘n’ roll favoured by Edward and the classical music that is central to Florence’s life. Dominic Cooke’s low-key, carefully structured film wonderfully balances these themes, showing throughout how cultural, social and relationship clashes can cause pain and strife.

Sex is of course the problem. At first nervous romance seems to be the theme – but it’s actually physical misunderstanding and incompatibility. Cooke’s film cuts back and forth from the wedding evening to fill in the gaps of their timeline that have brought Edward and Florence to this point, and explain their psychology going into this wedding night that will shape their lives. Edward has no understanding of Florence’s nerves and fear about sex, while Florence fails to effectively articulate these feelings in a way that Edward can understand or sympathise with.

Essentially, it’s a tragedy about a failure of communication and how hasty, ill thought out words and decisions can shatter an otherwise extremely happy relationship. Because there is no doubt – and McEwan makes it even clearer here than in the novella – of how this couple are perfectly suited together. Cooke’s film captures the halcyon dreaminess of their courtship in the giddy summer of 1962, in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside. The film hums with their immediate attraction and strong feelings for each other – while also laying the groundwork of their failure to really and fully communicate with each other. The sexual encounter between them is agonising in its clumsiness, nerves, awkwardness, functionality and eventual total failure.

It works so well in these segments as both leads bring expressive, empathy filled performances to the screen. Howle is very good as a man struggling with his place in the world, who juggles bohemian ideals and longings with a keen desire to be seen as “a man”, to be well regarded by others. Ronan is also excellent as a young woman who in many ways is both ahead of her time and left behind it, ambitious and forward thinking but oppressed and terrified by physical contact. The tragedy is that she relaxes so much with Edward, but can’t bring herself to voice her concerns, fears and tortured history to him.

It’s that tortured history where the film leans a little too hard. The book holds dark suggestions that Florence may have been abused by her father, but in the film McEwan moves them from subtext into full-on text. Samuel West is very good as this intimidating figure, but the explanation that much of Florence’s sexual discomfort is directly related to ill-defined sexual misdemeanours from her father feels slightly pat. Far more interesting is the idea that she is simply scared of contact, and struggling to adapt the prim 1950s ideas she has been brought up with to the modern era.

But the film wants to give a deeper meaning to a drama that is more interesting when it looks at troubled psychologies at a time when the world was shifting from one generation to another. It remains a very slight story – and even at 100 minutes it feels like it is stretching the content of the novel – but also one that does carry a lot of emotional weight. The film’s coda, set in 2007, leans a little too heavily on the actors now layered under old-age pancake make-up (it’s noticeably not included in the novella, which gives no information about Florence’s future life at all) but it carries a real sense of sadness and loss for both characters, one of whom has seen their life drift into nothingness, another who has achieved but still carries a sense of sadness for a lost love. McEwan’s careful, elegant script captures a lot of this small-scale tragedy and if the film is slight and at times a little too obvious, it’s also able to induce a tear or two.