The amateur spy – the innocent caught up in espionage malarkey – had scarcely graced the screen for a couple of decades, Hot Enough for June/Agent 8¾ (1964) or Masquerade (1965) possibly the highpoints of that subgenre. That it turns up at all is probably due to spymaster John le Carre’s Cold War comfort zone evaporating following glasnost and perestroika in Russia in the late 1980s. Of course, the West didn’t entirely trust the Soviets to reform, and had no intention of pensioning off its battalions of secret agents.
The plotline is largely irrelevant here, acting more as a MacGuffin than anything else, because audiences will have long forgotten what was sacred to the West three decades ago. And the picture is devoid of the usual car chase and there’s not even the kind of foot-race that became de rigeur to prove our ageing superstars could still physically hack it – Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire (1993) or Liam Neeson in Taken (2008).
So what we’re left with is probably what le Carre was hoping for in the first place – a character study. It may have passed your notice that among the highest ranks of the superstars only Sean Connery could match Tom Hanks in actually changing his appearance – different hairstyle, different beard (yep, you didn’t think that could define character, did you) – to depict character. Of course, nobody was expecting Stallone or Schwarzenegger to alter their look; Harrison Ford got a buzzcut once; but Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, even going further back to James Stewart, Gary Cooper, their hairstyle remained untouched, and until Connery made it part of his persona Hollywood believed that moustaches were box office disaster.
Barley (Sean Connery) is an upmarket publisher whose business is on the slide, so much so that he doesn’t attend an annual book fair in Moscow. So when Russian single mother Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer) turns up looking for him, she ends up handing a manuscript to Penguin’s representative who, naturally, turns it over to MI6.
Takes a while what with interrogation and flashback to work out why Barley has been selected. Unwittingly, on a previous sojourn to Russia, he had made the acquaintance, over a drunken dinner, with Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer) who turns out to be Katya’s long-ago first love and, more importantly, a nuclear scientist with secrets to sell or give away. Barley is hooked into returning to Russia to gain the confidence of both Katya and Dante and provide access to secrets the British Secret Service and their Yank counterparts desire.
That it doesn’t go the way the high-ups want is because Barley is a “decent human being” and when he realizes he has compromised Katya, and endangered the lives of her two young children, he turns traitor and trades their safety for secrets.
Given the plot and counter-plot thesis, and the various axes that need to be ground over nuclear weapons accumulation and inherent corruption, this cinematic enterprise could have proved way too unwieldy for a contemporary audience. Instead, the very fact that much of the background is now meaningless clears the way for the movie to stand on its own two feet, as yet another wonderful character study in the largely unheralded Sean Connery (The Hill, 1965) portfolio. And with Michelle Pfeiffer turning in a Golden Globe-winning performance, the movie hinges more on the characters than the espionage.
There’s a fabulous scene where the initial narrative is just turned on its head. You’re already thinking MI6 must be hard put to be even thinking of employing Barley, given he’s a bit of a boozer, the kind of guy who knocks one whisky straight down before sipping the next. Katya, attempting to establish his bona fides and suspicious that he’s actually a spy, asks him, “Are you alone?” Meaning, has he come alone, is he acting independently?
Barley takes a different meaning from the question. “Never been more alone,” he replies, barely concealing the despair in his eyes. “I let people down,” he confesses at another point.
His life is headed in all the wrong directions. He’s fluffed too many lines and no guarantee he’s even capable of looking for redemption. And Katya’s way too wary. He’s like an enthusiastic schoolboy when he falls in love with her. When he dives in for a kiss, she tilts her head so he can only kiss her cheek in the Russian fashion.
His romancing comes unstuck when instead of responding to his ardor she recounts her experiences with Dante. It’s her scene and yet Connery steals it with his slow-burn despair. Her wariness shows in her face. The purported new freedoms her country promotes mean little more than citizens can more freely complain.
While you might not go along with his self-deprecating description of himself as a “large unmade bed” – his physical grace always going to make this unlikely – nonetheless he is a shambles of a man. Even Connery can’t make fashionable the duffel coat, his perennial outfit of choice, an item of clothing that to generations epitomized the unfashionable, a garment worn by those who couldn’t care less about their appearance.
Connoisseurs of Connery’s hair and beard will notice a certain rumpled element compared to the stylish beard he wore in Rising Sun (1993) or the confident full version of The Hunt for Red October (1990).
Outside of the Connery-Pfieffer axis, although the narrative stumbles in accommodating their manoeuvring, the movie boasts a phalanx of interesting supporting actors, some fallen from the marquee heights like Roy Scheider (Jaws, 1975) and James Fox (Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1967), others who would make their mark in television like John Mahoney (Frasier, 1993-2004), Martin Clunes (Men Behaving Badly, 1992-2014), David Threlfall (Shameless, 2004-2013) and Michael Kitchen (Foyle’s War, 2002-2015) and topped up with a wild-eyed indulgent performance from director Ken Russell (Billion Dollar Brain, 1967).
Rather devoid of screenwriter Tom Stoppard’s (Shakespeare in Love, 1998) trademark humor except in a couple of aural jokes about odd sounds emanating from hidden microphones. The first movie to be filmed in Russia after glasnost so a bit more authentic location work than usual. To his credit director Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1978) allows Connery and Pfeiffer full rein rather than getting bogged down in the inescapable politics and office backstabbing.
Watch it for Connery and Pfeiffer.
Be warned: I feel a Connery binge coming on.
The Magnificent 60s 