The more I know, the more I realize that I don’t know much about anything. I learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis in school and it’s come up in a variety of documentaries. I thought I knew the story. It’s one of the defining moments in the Cold War and, the more I think about it, world history. The main players are the Americans and the Soviets. I haven’t given thought to what tension the rest of the world would have been feeling as mutual mass destruction seemed more and more likely.
Thankfully, we never got to that point. I think the phrase “cooler heads prevailed” is applicable.
Benedict Cumberbatch makes for a good bore. Despite that distinctive face and that low, sensuous drone of a voice — or maybe because of them — there’s a comforting sturdiness to him that makes him ideal for playing resoundingly ordinary people. In Dominic Cooke’s The Courier, Cumberbatch plays an unremarkable British businessman who gets roped into an elaborate Cold War espionage scheme in the early 1960s. It’s the kind of role for which an extraordinary, unpredictable actor just will not do. A Daniel Day-Lewis or a Gary Oldman would be completely lost in the part. You need a great actor who can nevertheless exude conventionality.
From left: Benedict Cumberbatch, Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan in The Courier. LIAM DANIEL/ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
Directing this good old-fashioned spy thriller, Dominic Cooke uses the talents of two superb actors. Benedict Cumberbatch , always reliable in a variety of roles, plays Greville Wynne, a British engineer turned salesman, who makes trips to Eastern Europe selling electronic equipment. . .
The other superb actor in this spy thriller is Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a former Colonel in the Soviet Army and now a top researcher in the USSR’s military intelligence agency. Appalled at the rapidity of the nuclear research conducted in Russia and alarmed at Khrushchev’s weapons build-up and threats of nuclear war, Penkovsky, also married and with a young daughter, wants to do all he can to avert a nuclear disaster in which there would be no winners. He is the C.I.A.’s contact and he will be passing the documents to Wynne.
Using all of the familiar tropes of spy thrillers, “The Courier” has scenes in which identity is established by use of a particular tie clasp; two men talk in a hotel room with a radio turned on so that surveillance bugging devices cannot detect them; documents filmed by a Minox camera hidden in a desk drawer; chalk marks used on outdoor equipment. Cooke’s trips to Moscow become protracted as more and more evidence of Russia’s nuclear capabilities appear in documents that Oleg passes on to Wynne.
2021 South Chinese Sea crises
Drones that swarmed U.S. warships are still unidentified, Navy chief says NBC
The Longest Telegram: A Visionary Blueprint for the Comprehensive Grand Strategy Against China We Need War on the Rocks. From April 1, still germane.
China Creates its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy WSJ
China Asks Banks to Curtail Credit for Rest of Year Bloomberg
China, US send warships into disputed waters as tensions rise over Whitsun Reef South China Morning Post
UK lawyers feel ripples of Chinese sanctions on Essex Court Chambers FT
Singapore to accept COVID-19 digital travel pass from next month Reuter