A businessman caught in a web of intrigue

 

   The most interesting character in The Courier, a real-life tale of espionage set during Cold War days of the 1960s, isn't the man who gives the movie its title.

   The Courier revolves around Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British businessman whose travels to the Soviet Union caught the attention of MI6, the agency that eventually would recruit Wynne to act as a courier.

    Under the guise of developing business relationships, Wynne made numerous trips to Moscow where he met a Soviet intelligence agent. The agent -- Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) --  provided Wynne with invaluable documents, including some pertaining to the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

      Thanks to Ninidze’s finely tuned portrayal, Penkovsky emerges as a dedicated military man who believes that the nuclear threat is far too grave to be subordinated to chauvinistic devotions. 

      You probably can tell where I'm headed. Penkovsky seems a deeper, more intriguing character than Wynne, a salesman with no talent for spycraft. As played by Cumberbatch, Wynne eventually allows his role as an amateur spy to go to his head.

     Cumberbatch handily shows how Wynne's ego inflates as he becomes more relaxed about what he's doing. His wife (Jessie Buckley) tells a friend that her husband's sexual appetites have been seriously boosted, although she doesn’t know why. She's not privy to her husband's secret life.

    The Courier is another example of a story that creates interest the movie can't quite match, particularly when it comes to suspenseful atmospherics.

    As told by director Dominic Cooke and screenwriter Tom O'Connor, Wynne feels responsible for helping Penkovsky and his family to escape to the West when things start to go bad. Penkovsky had been promised help exiting the Soviet Union.

     Willing to cut its losses, British intelligence watched as both men were arrested.  Wynne, who decided to act on his own in attempting to rescue Penkovsky, spent 18 months in a Soviet prison where he was beaten, tormented and starved. 

     He ultimately was released in a spy swap.

    The movie finds its greatest power in its prison scenes: Cumberbatch seems to have followed a physical formula during Wynne's imprisonment, shedding weight to the point of emaciation.

     Of the supporting performances, several are notable. Angus Wright portrays the MI6 contact who coaches Wynne and Rachel Brosnahan plays an American CIA agent, another of Wynne's contacts. Kirill Pirogov appears as the Soviet intelligence officer who begins to suspect that Penkovsky has become a traitor.

    John Le Carre this isn't: Late in the movie, Penkovsky tells Wynne that they are only two people but that they can change the world. I don't know if the real Penkovsky, who committed suicide in prison, ever said anything like that but the sentiment seems trite for a movie that tries to thrive on complexity and intrigue.

     These complexities (the willingness of intelligence agencies to exploit ordinary citizens and the torments of turning against one's country) don’t cut as deeply as they should.

     A sturdy cast and a story that may be unfamiliar to many viewers help sustain interest but The Courier never seems more than a minor addition to the big-screen espionage canon.

A marriage not made in heaven

On Chisel Beach shows the life-altering consequences of a single evening.

Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle are exceptionally good in theater director Dominic Cooke's On Chesil Beach, an adaptation of a novel by Ian McEwan, who also wrote the movie's screenplay.

The movie tells the story of awkward newlyweds trying to navigate the shoals of sex on their honeymoon by the sea, a situation that gives McEwan an opportunity to explore the sad consequences of attitudes that prevailed in the pre-sexual revolution days of the early 1960s.

On the surface, both Florence Ponting and Edward Mayhew are promising young people. She's a classical violinist with a bright future as a professional musician. A smart history student, Edward hails from a less sophisticated background than Florence. He's more of a rock n' roll guy, but he falls hard for Florence, he did well in college and he seems in possession of a good spirit.

Scenes in the newlywed's hotel room at Chesil Beach in Dorset are interrupted by flashbacks that show the lively courtship between Florine and Edward and their sometimes uneasy introductions to each other's families.

Florence's father (Samuel West) follows a strictly business ethos, even on the tennis court. Her mother (Emily Watson) teaches at Oxford. Poor Edward is supposed to join the Ponting family business, a prospect with about as much appeal as a stint in solitary.

Edward's father (Adrian Scarborough) seems like one of those nice but ineffectual men who has spent his life trying hard without getting a grip on much of anything. Edward's mother (Anne-Marie Duff), a woman who suffered brain damage as the result of an accident, presents a particular challenge. She unselfconsciously wanders about in the nude, unmoored from ordinary restraints.

Not surprisingly, Florence and Edward's wedding night turns into a nightmare: Edward is fumbling but aggressive; Florence finds the idea of sex a bit repellant. Both are virgins.

After an unsuccessful attempt to consummate the marriage, Florence and Edward wind up on the desolate, rocky Dorset beach where it becomes clear that an impatient Edward can't transcend his ideas about marriage. Florence seems the more sensitive of the two but more than a bit unrealistic.

In its final going, the movie skips ahead to show us (perhaps ill-advisedly) what happened to Florence and Edward at various points after their fateful day at the beach.

The movie's emotions derive from Edward's regret. Thematically, we're probably meant to conclude that had these two come of age in the 1970s rather than the 1950s, their lives might have been entirely different. As it stands, Florence and Edward are young people whose lives are shaped by their inability to deal with intimacy -- either emotional or physical.

In all, On Chisel Beach is a well-acted movie that feels more slender than it probably should, neither an insular chamber piece nor a full-blown look at crippling sexual mores. It's not easy to think expansively about a movie that tries to make an awful lot out of one wretched night.