Butler's Cinema Scene

Benedict Cumberbatch, Rachel Brosnahan

“THE COURIER” My rating: B- (In theaters March 19)

111 minutes: MPAA rating: PG-13

Like its title, “The Courier” is an unprepossessing Cold War thriller that, despite an OK turn from leading man Benedict Cumberbatch and a based-on-fact birthright, never works up a full head of steam.

In the early 1960s British businessman Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch) was recruited by his country’s spymasters. An independent salesman who represented dozens of Western manufacturers, Wynne was encouraged by the M-16 spooks to expand his operation to the growing Soviet market.

Mostly he was to carry on business as usual. But from time to time he would be asked to bring pilfered Soviet secrets back to London.

Initially Wynne rejects the idea.  He’s not a spy, after all.

Noting Wynne’s unremarkable military record and his gone-to-flab physique, his handler reassures him: “If this mission were really dangerous you’re the last man we’d send.”

Wynn’s contact in Moscow is Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a WWII hero now working for the KGB, though his “official” title is that of trade specialist.  Penkovsky is the film’s most interesting character, a guy so traumatized by Krushchev’s podium pounding and the growing Cuban Missile Crisis that he’s willing to turn his country’s secrets over to the West in the hope of avoiding all-out nuclear war.

Merab Ninidze, Benedict Cumberbatch

Dominic Cooke’s film (the screenplay is by Tom O’Connor) is mostly a slow simmer. The Russkies are eager for the products Wynne is selling, and in Penkovsky theBrit visitor finds a kindred spirit, a family man with a keen sense of right, wrong and duty (if not to one’s country, then to the world at large). The friendship between these two partners in espionage is the glue that holds “The Courier” together.

After a slow first half, things pick up as the Soviets — who have their own spies within British intelligence — realize there is a mole at the highest levels of their security apparatus. A noose starts tightening around our two protagonists; plans are laid to move Penkovsky and his family to freedom.

To add anything more about where the plot is going would ruin whatever suspense the film generas.

Let’s just say that over the course of two years Penkovsky and Wynne smuggled so much top-secret info out of the U.S.S.R. that they became espionage legends.

Jessie Buckley plays Sheila Wynne,  unaware of her hubby’s cloak-and-dagger alter ego and frustrated by his change in personality (the stress of being a spy starts to gnaw at his stiff-upper-lip reserve).  Rachel Brosnahan portrays a CIA agent who joins forces with the Brits to “work” Wynne…Brosnahan is fine but the character seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of giving the Yank audience a familiar face and name on the marquee.

| Robert W. Butler