Review: "The Courier"

 

There are a lot of stark, weighty moments in “The Courier,” a tense political thriller about a largely forgotten spy intrigue around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis that centers on two unlikely figures.

Greville Wynne, a largely anonymous British businessman, was recruited to be the go-between man for Oleg Penkovsky, a highly placed Soviet official who leaked information critical to the West getting Nikita Khrushchev to back down and remove nuclear armaments from Cuba.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wynne as a feckless middle-class salesman, sort of a lovable huckster, who gets drawn into the scheme reluctantly and winds up emotionally invested. He and Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) become friends of a sort, doing a lot of drinking and carousing in the name of putting on a show for all the Soviet surveillance following them around on Wynne’s trips to Moscow -- but also because they build a genuine kinship.

In my opinion the film spends too much time on various side characters, and instead should’ve focused intently on the relationship between the two men. Penkovsky, a war hero, considers himself a patriot and loyal Communist. But he can’t stand the reckless, impulsive ways of Khruschev, despite being a pet favorite. Wynne’s an apolitical type who comes to fear the global threat on his doorstep.

Still, we get lots of the usual enjoyable “spy movie stuff,” or at least the more realistic mold in the vein of “Bridge of Spies” than James Bond. There are dead drops, clandestine meetings, code names (“Ironbark” for Penkovsky), complicated escape plots, and all the rest. And Cumberbatch and Ninidze do build a solid onscreen rapport, especially in same later scenes when things take a grim turn for their characters.

Rachel Brosnahan plays Emily Donovan, an American CIA agent who first steers Penkovsky toward her English MI6 counterparts, with Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) acting as her main partner. In typical fashion, the British spy lords are stuffy and conservative, while the fiery Yank is always pushing for bigger, bolder -- and riskier -- actions.

(Of course, Brosnahan gets several everyone’s-staring-at-her scenes where people are shocked by the presence of a woman in these circles, which are tiring.)

Wynne, who had already represented Western manufacturers in Soviet bloc countries, is convinced by the pair to do the initial outreach to Penkovsky, the idea being that all their operatives have already been marked by Russian snoops. Plus, Wynne is the perfect cover because he doesn’t resemble a spy -- though I did chortle at their description of Wynne, played by the whippet-lean Cumberbatch, as flabby and out-of-shape.

Wynne initially refuses, pointing out that his wife, Sheila, is too smart not to figure things out. She’s played by dynamic Jessie Buckley, rather wasted in a standard “fretting housewife” role. Olga Koch plays Penkovsky’s wife, while Kirill Pirogov is nicely icy as the KGB man who begins sniffing after him, though very politely.

Director Dominic Cooke and screenwriter Tom O'Connor keep things moving at a quick pace, not getting too bogged down in the geopolitical implications of the missile crisis, which mostly takes place in the background on television screens or radio broadcasts.

Can two men really change the world? Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky altered the trajectory of the Cold War, possibly even helping avert the nuclear attack that represents the closest the world ever came to total manmade devastation. They get their deserved moment in the hero’s limelight with “The Courier.”

 

Video review: "Judy"

"What’s ‘Judy’ about?” someone asked me when the film was hitting theaters.

“It’s about Renée Zellweger making her big comeback and giving an Oscar-bait performance,” I responded.

“No, no, I mean the story. What’s the movie about?” they said.

“It’s a movie about getting Renée Zellweger her big comeback performance and maybe winning an Oscar.”

A bit flip, but true. “Judy” is one of those movies that isn’t just built around a leading performance, it is the film in its entirety. Zellweger plays Judy Garland during her last bitter years, her star faded but her voice still strong.

It’s a great role for an actress whose career hit a slump around age 40, as so many sadly do. Hollywood loves the ingénue and seems to have little room for women in their middle years. It happened to Susan Sarandon, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep, too.

They managed to turn it around and cruise into their “grand dame” years, and that’s what Zellweger’s turn here is trying to do.

I liked the film without really falling in love. I often find that biopics containing a single overpowering performance – “Ray,” “Capote,” etc. – tend to have an innate ceiling below greatness. Stories and secondary characters are shunted aside in the bid to keep the spotlight burning bright on the star.

Set in the late 1960s, the story follows Garland when she was booked to play an extended engagement at a London theater. She was long sick of showbiz, but with bills to pay and an ongoing custody battle for kids, Garland didn’t have much choice.

Jessie Buckley plays Rosalyn, the handler assigned to watch over Garland and make sure she shows up for her performances and not get too drunk. Some flashback scenes feature Darci Shaw as a teen Garland first getting a harsh introduction to Hollywood via a creepy Louis B. Mayer.

“Judy” is a solid biopic, but once you get past Zellweger’s snappy performance as a self-loathing faded star, there’s not much fairy dust to speak of.

Bonus features are fairly skimpy. There’s just an image gallery from the set and a documentary, “From the Heart: The Making of Judy.”

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "Judy"

“I still believe in it, y’know -- the love you find with an audience.”

Judy Garland was known for having more career comebacks than you could count. Really, her entire adult career was one long comeback from the Golden Age stardom of her child/ingenue years. She was the studio’s hand-picked “America’s sweetheart” -- until she become a grown woman who stumbled through addiction, financial instability and one bad marriage after another.

Renée Zellweger hasn’t been the star of a mainstream movie since 2009’s “New in Town,” so people are calling “Judy” her comeback picture. She’s 50 now, an age when many Hollywood many actresses find themselves lonely for projects. So there’s a certain synergy in her playing an over-the-hill flameout trying to make one last go at stardom.

(It should be noted, she’s already older than Garland was at her death, though they have to use aging makeup to make her sufficiently haggard.)

She is indeed a knockout playing Garland during the last months of her life, a faded star who’s sick of showbiz but is forced to suck at the only teat available to her. Unable to get booked anywhere else, she just wants the financial means to support her two younger children, over whose custody she is fighting a long-game war with ex-hubby Sidney Luft (Rufus Sewell).

Zellweger nails the mannerisms and singing of Garland, including that strange head-shaking, humped-posture thing she acquired later in her career. The looks aren’t exactly spot-on, but the hair, makeup and lighting are close enough that after a while you don’t think about it much.

The actress will almost certainly get an Academy Award nomination out of this, and deserves to.
But I can’t help but put “Judy” in a pile with other similar Oscar-bait biopics like “Ray” and “Capote.” The central performance so dominates the film as to overpower the narrative function. The acting is the story.

So side characters are not given space to live and breathe, and the narrative tends to hover in place rather than go anywhere.

It’s quite literally all Judy, Judy, Judy.

I confess the iconography Garland holds in certain communities, particularly among gay men, is bewildering to me. Garland was a talented singer, though more as a crooner-for-hire than as someone who made indelible music of her own. By my lights she was a middling actress at best.

The screenplay by Tom Edge, based on a play by Peter Quilter, focuses on a period of a few months in the late 1960s when Garland sang at a big London theater. Director Rupert Goold (“True Story”) stages the many musical numbers with appreciable skill and flair, and they are the highlight of the experience.

The wonderful Jessie Buckley is largely wasted as Rosalyn, the British handler assigned to take care of her during her London stay. This mostly involves making sure she shows up in the right places at the right times at an acceptable level of inebriation.

I kept hoping the two characters would forge some kind of bond or even an All-About-Eve-ish antagonism, but their interactions skim the surface.

Michael Gambon plays the theater owner, standing in the wings and fretting about Judy’s erratic performances on his stage. Royce Pierreson is Burt, the band leader who craves collaboration but is dismissed to the background.

Darci Shaw plays Judy as a teen in flashback scenes, where she is controlled by Louis B. Mayer, who sees her as his personal creation, and pet. (I can’t find a credit for the actor who plays Mayer, but he’s terrific.) Their insistence that she starve herself began a lifelong habit of pill-popping and insomnia.

Finn Wittrock plays Mickey Deans, an agreeably scruffy young admirer who presses himself upon Garland at a party thrown by her daughter, Liza Minnelli, already a big star on her own. That mother-daughter relationship is left almost completely unexplored, though we traipse through the tiresome infatuation/ingratiation/dissolution journey with Mickey.

The time elapse from their marriage to breakup scene must set some kind of filmmaking record.

I enjoyed a lot of things about “Judy,” but it’s one of those movies that is good bordering on very good without ever finding true greatness. People will go see it to witness one Hollywood legend playing the hell out of another bygone one.

That’s fine, but I wish there was more story to tell beyond the spotlight.

Review: "Wild Rose"

"Why country?"
"Because it's three chords and the truth."

Sometimes a movie sets a beautiful table, knocks you out with a first course, and then the rest of the meal just doesn't sing like the early going did.

I liked a lot of things about "Wild Rose." It stars Jessie Buckley, an Irish actress (playing Scottish here) who was mesmerizing in "Beast" and has a had a few parts in things American audiences might have seen, like the HBO miniseries "Chernobyl." She's got a very raw way of acting, as if there is no filter between her emotions and ours.

Buckley is also very interesting to look at, with a wide lioness face that exists somewhere beyond conventional definitions of attractiveness, like a female version of Michael Shannon. You can't take your eyes off her.

The film has a novel premise: a youngish Scottish woman dreams of making it to Nashville and breaking out in the country music business. (Don't you dare call it country-and-western.) She's spent the last 10 years or so eking out a small following at the Grand Ole Opry of Glasgow, which I bet you didn't know was a thing.

Americans are so inundated with the conventional wisdom that everybody hates us we forget that most people in other parts of the world want to be us.

So fellows spitting out nearly indecipherable highland brogue put on embroidered shirts, boots and cowboy hats and boot-scoot it around the saloon in imitation/reverence of the Western ethos.

(Speaking of speaking: I wish the folks distributing this film had gone ahead and provided subtitles. Peoples divided by a common language and all that.)

As the story opens Rose-Lynn Harlan has spent the last year in prison on drug charges. She's eager to get back on stage; the opry management, less so. Her mother (the great Julie Walters) has been watching after her kids, ages 8 and 5 or so. She thinks Rose-Lynn should hang up her dreams of being a professional singer, get to work like she did and focus her energies on her kids.

This conflict forms the central, and really only, dynamic in the story.

Screenwriter Nicole Taylor and director Tom Harper balance these two values, showing the worth of both but also the pitfalls. If Rose-Lynn is to chase her dreams that means taking risks, long absences and leaving her children with others. If she settles into a secure maternal role, she'll be unhappy and hqf3 shown her kids a model of people giving up.

A potential solution presents itself: while working as a maid (the Brits call it "day woman") for a wealthy couple, Rose-Lynn suggests her employer, Susannah (Sophie Okonedo) simply give her the few thousand quid she'd need to get to the States. From her perspective, Susannah is spending all her money on bottled water and other fancy stuff she doesn't really need. That doesn't go over so well, but a bond starts to form.

Rich people have connections: someone knows someone who knows Bob Harris, the legendary BBC broadcaster who likes country music. Maybe an introduction could be made? Or Susannah could recruit her fellow well-heeled sorts for a fundraising concert.

I won't give anything away of where the story ends up, though you can guess early on this is one of those "the journey is more important than the destination" type of tales.

That's well and good, but to sustain our interest the journey has to actually cover some mileage, either geographically or emotionally. This one seems to spin round and round on the same tired track.

The scenes between Buckley and Walters are fearsomely good, until they start repeating themselves. The interactions with the kids similarly find a groove that quickly becomes a rut.

Buckley appears to do her own singing, and she's terrific. She does a good imitation of female country singers, who often mix girly sweetness with big, audacious howls of pain and regret. It's mostly covers, though Rose-Lynn eventually gets around to writing some of her own stuff. Jack Arnold wrote the tunes.

Countless young people have struck out from their homes to pursue their dreams, with the locale depending on what those dreams are: Hollywood, New York, Paris, etc. The sad truth is very few make it. They end up waiting tables or surviving as a background player in other people's spotlight. Or they return home, knowing others will see it as a defeat.

In the end "Wild Rose" is a fairly conventional tale, aside from the exotic setting.

Video review: "Beast"

Most actors employ a lot of tricks, but I couldn’t spot any of Jessica Buckley’s in “Beast.” In this revelatory performance, she plays a severely oppressed young woman living under the thumb of family and community expectations who finds a way to break free through a romance with a local undesirable.

Moll lives on a lovely British island, working as a bus guide for tourists. Her older siblings are already married and started families, and it’s not hard to see that her mother (Geraldine James) views her as the disappointment of the family. As the story opens Moll is attending a birthday party, which turns out to be her own, but she’s treated morse as the servant than the guest of honor.

She has a chance encouter with Pascal (Johnny Flynn), an unnerving fellow who spends his days at odd jobs and poaching. They fall into an uneasy romance, which is bothersome to most everyone Moll knows, which is the main thrust of the appeal.

But when local girls start turning up strangled, Pascal becomes the chief suspect. Moll defends him but harbors her own doubts. Her mind starts to fracture, resulting in terrible visions in which she herself is a perpetrator.

It’s an audacious feature film debut for writer/director Michael Pearce, who along with Buckley draws an intimate, unsettling portrait of a young woman who’s been a target all her life. Finally given a chance to express herself, she finds that freedom can become its own prison.

Video extras are unfortunately rather modest. They consist of a gallery of photo stills from the production and a making-of documentary short.

Movie: 
 


Extras:

Review: Beast"

I had never heard of Jessie Buckley before, but I shan't soon forget her after her ravishing, emotionally outsized performance in the erotic thriller, "Beast."

Buckley appeared on one of those "anybody can be a star" TV programs in Great Britain a few years ago, and has since made a name for herself as a singer, stage and TV actress. This is her first starring film role and, if we're lucky, the prelude to many more.

There's a startling immediacy to her screen presence; we don't sense the usual thespian tricks and remove of the craft. Buckley is just there, right in front of us, never hiding.

She plays Moll, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do family living on a picturesque, unnamed British island. When I first glimpsed her, I thought Moll to be a teenager, but that's just how everyone treats her. Geraldine James plays her disciplinarian mother, who views Moll as a mere extension of herself and her household.

Moll's older siblings (Oliver Maltman and Shannon Tarbet) are already married and starting families, so she's expected to stay at home, caring for her dementia-stricken father, and offer endless obedience. She works in the day as a tour bus guide, droning to blue-haired ladies about the island where she's lived her whole life, but which holds no enchantment.

She's upstaged at her own birthday party, and exercises a rare moment of rebellion by sneaking away to a club, dancing until dawn. We sense this may just be the happiest night of Moll's life, until the fellow she's with gets handsy. Luckily Pascal Renouf (Johnny Flynn) shows up to chase him away, wielding the rifle he's been using to poach rabbits.

Problem is, Pascal is far scarier than the fellow he ran off. With his hollow face etched with scars, framed by scruffy pale hair and beard, blue eyes that stare with unnerving clarity, ragged clothes and hands casually stained with blood, Pascal is like a primordial version of man sprung from the sea, a hunter wandering among the prey.

Moll is instantly captivated by him, and they soon begin a torrid affair that causes much frowning. At first it's just because of tired class divisions -- he wears black jeans to a country club dinner! -- but soon there are whisperings about his sordid past.

More disturbingly, a series of murders is plaguing the isle, one dead girl turning up after another. They've all been raped and suffocated, their mouths stuffed with raw earth. Pascal easily becomes the prime suspect, and by extension Moll becomes a target herself for the community's ire.

Clifford (Trystan Gravelle), a police officer who's long harbored a crush for her, tries to warn Moll off, but is rebuffed. More official inquiries soon follow; the lies start to pile up.

Moll, a girl who's been a victim her entire life, is resentful that everyone is pressing down on Pascal, ruining her first -- possibly only? -- chance at love. But part of her can't shake the suspicion the accusations are true.

She even starts to have daydreams about committing unspeakable acts herself. A tidbit from her own past reminds us that sudden, sharp violence is not unknown to her. Moll occasionally plucks random long hairs she discovers growing from her body.

Is Pascal the beast, or she? Or maybe they both are, and he just wears his malevolence more outwardly?

Writer/director Michael Pearce, making his feature film debut, gives us an astonishingly evocative film in which the spoken words carry the least of the information to the audience. Much of the movie is spent just looking at Moll, seeing how awkward and timid she is, then watching her grow -- not always in a positive way -- in the warmth of Pascal's seething glow.

Buckley has an amazingly frank, raw, almost feral beauty. With her one-sided smile and tangle of crimson curls, we know in our hearts Moll was always the bullied girl at school, the one they called ugly who never had a boyfriend. She's internalized that abuse to such an extent it's become an intrinsic part of her shriveled personality.

She is the unwanted, the woman everyone takes for granted. Now someone finally wants her for her, and she throws herself into that desire with frightening abandon.

There's one brief, wonderful scene where Moll has come home after a night out with Pascal. Her hands are filthy, and she sits on the couch, grinding her crusted fingernails into the pristine cushions, leaving tracks of filth. Her face beams with dark satisfaction in this act, the good little girl finally finding the fierce woman inside.

"Beast" is a gorgeous, sensuous, forbidding work of cinema. It's like a warm embrace, and then it starts to squeeze with a killer's strength.