The Courier - the long way home

 

The Courier

2020, English

Dominic Cooke - Director

Angus Wright - Dickie Franks

Benedict Cumberbatch - Greville Wynne

Jessie Buckley - Sheila

Merab Ninidze - Oleg aka Alex Penkovsky

Rachel Brosnahan - Emily

In many ways, The Courier reminds you of those PBS miniseries you watch only after you have binged the Indian movies on Prime and Hotstar.  But, this film is much more than that.  It is a visceral, raw, hardened look at a time when the world was in a war without large-scale weapons, without soldiers marching onto battlefields. 

It was a time of the Cold War, where the two most powerful nations on earth played a game of dice with one another.  Much like the Mahabharata, the fate of the people, indeed the survival of the world, depended on the luck of the toss.

Mr. Cumberbatch is brilliant as the pawn in all of this, a self-made businessman who is recruited to carry to and from the Soviet Union to an inside man high up in the Kremlin ranks.  What starts off as playing James Bond quickly deteriorates into an all too real torture, and an opportunity to be humbled to the point that one's own identity is lost.

This is not a movie to watch with the kids, and it is not a movie about events that most of you will even understand, leave alone remember.  But, it is a movie to contemplate upon.  For, if given the same choices, would we have done the same?

Mohan's Measure ⭐⭐⭐⭐