Female Film Critics 24/375
British director Dominic Cooke opens The Courier with on-screen titles announcing that by 1960 the United States/Soviet Union nuclear arms race had intensified with imminent destruction threatening. With the Cuban missile crisis as the historical backdrop, this cloak-and-dagger story, based on true events, unfolds with suspense and revelations regarding the CIA, Britain’s MI6, and a Russian traitor.
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Truth be told, I usually enjoy almost any spy film; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Bridge of Spies, and Three Days of the Condor among my favorites. But sometimes I want to like a film more than it merits. That’s how I felt watching The Operative, with its cloak-and-dagger twists and turns amidst disjointed development.
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Based on the real-life story of Melita Norwood, arrested for being a KGB intelligence source, by way of Jennie Rooney’s 2013 novel, the screenplay by Lindsay Shapero makes clear enough that the “spy granny” upset lots of people. It also makes clear a series of clichés, including Joan’s initial recruitment by a conventionally exotic Communist, Sonya , who enters her Cambridge dorm room window in order to avoid being caught following an escapade with a boy.
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Lacking the tension it might have had had the story been presented as a thriller, Red Joan instead wallows in melodrama. What could have been the crackling story of a spy so good she got away with it for decades dissipates into weak soap opera.
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