Company of Strangers
The mere thought of sitting through "The Company," TNT's six-hour, three-part adaptation of novelist Robert Littell's CIA Cold War trilogy, may be enough to test your patience. And even if you pass the test, you will still be subjected to background checks, psychological profiling, and, of course, the indispensable lie-detector test.
Do you really have what it takes to make it through all three episodes of the series? Are you going to sneak off to the Hamptons before the second episode even airs? Are you organized enough to set your TiVo to record all three episodes? Do you even own a TiVo? Yes or No?
Showing in three two-hour installments over three weeks, beginning Monday, "The Company" takes us from the early days of the CIA's 1954 battle of wits with the KGB in Berlin all the way, via the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the joyous dismemberment of the Berlin Wall. The film is frequently ponderous, overacted, and (at times) so studded with clichés there'll be moments when you practically have déjà vu.
Yet there's a heart beating somewhere inside it; unfortunately, it doesn't fully manifest itself until the final installment. This is bad news for Michael Keaton, who is particularly good as the CIA's legendary counter-intelligence specialist, James Jesus Angleton, aka "Mother." Most of his screen time comes in Episode 3, by which time viewers may have dropped away like East German communists circa 1989.
Chris O'Donnell plays the blond, idealistic hero, Jack McAuliffe, recruited by the agency at Yale along with his best friend and rowing buddy, Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola). Jack becomes a field agent, while Leo gets a desk job in the agency's Soviet division, where he swiftly makes his mark working alongside Angleton, agency head Allen Dulles (Cedric Smith), and Frank Wisner (Ted Atherton), a true believer who goes mad from guilt when the CIA fails to back the Hungarian rebels after initially encouraging them to rise up.
"The Company" kicks off in 1954 in the American Sector of Berlin, a pockmarked metropolis where the streetlights beam sickly rays on greasy cobblestones. There, spies, of whom there are supposedly 7,000 floating around town, make speeches about "the Great Game" and rarely let an opportunity slip to let you know about the "wilderness of mirrors" in which they find themselves, about "deceptions behind deceptions, moves behind moves." In case we miss the point, there is even a scene in which Jack loses a couple of KGB agents in an actual hall of mirrors, though they're such goons he could probably have lost them in a living room.
A Russian defector has shown up at the CIA's Berlin station, where Harvey Torriti (an excellent Alfred Molina), holds fiery, alcoholic sway. The defector has information about a mole in Britain's MI6, but of course he could be lying.
"Even if we know the defector is a double agent," Harvey tells Jack, "we play the game as if we don't know. We use the false information the Russians are giving us against them. Plus, we use some disinformation of our own."
"It's a delicate game, isn't it?" queries Jack.
"More than you know."
Not dashing enough to give the part much romantic flavor, too soft-faced and earnest to make a crediblefield agent, Mr. O'Donnell seems miscast in the central role. He looks like someone who would be incapable of lying about what he ate for dinner, let alone about what he does for a living — a fatal flaw in the espionage field, one would have thought.
Nonetheless, he does a good job of conveying his growing disillusionment and hurt as the years and betrayals pile up. By the time the Soviet empire finally collapses, he, along with the other veterans in the agency, is so exhausted and ill that the celebratory champagne goes down like vinegar.
Funnily enough, all the self-conscious talk about "the Great Game" leads into what's best about "The Company," which is espionage as chess match rather than James Bond-style heroics. The most intriguing characters tend to be the spymasters — Angleton, Toritti, the Mossad's Ezra Ben Ezra (Antony Sher), MI6's Elihu Epstein (Simon Callow, making the most of a cameo limited to a couple of meetings on park benches), and Angleton's counterpart in the KGB, Starik (Ulrich Thomsen), who devotes decades to feeding Angleton false leads and plotting the downfall of the American stock market.
Potentially, the most fascinating character of all is Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane), a fluent English-speaker who knew Jack and Leo at Yale and, unbeknownst to his former buddies, remains in America for the best part of his life working for the KGB. But "The Company" casts its net too wide, lavishing screen time on forgettable characters and botching the chance to convey what it would be like to spend an entire life behind enemy lines.
"With your new identity," Yevgeny is told shortly after leaving Yale, "you will part your hair differently, you will walk differently, you will even make love differently." But we never see him devise a new bedroom routine (which would certainly have been interesting), and his hair is usually obscured by a signature cloth cap. Since he wore one at Yale, surely that ought to have been the first thing to go.
Episodes 1 and 3, set decades apart, focus on the purging of traitors — inside both MI6 and the CIA. Episode 2, in which Jack gets down and dirty with anti-communist forces during the Hungarian uprising and then during the Bay of Pigs — both catastrophic failures — is the big "action" section of the series and by far the weakest, particularly since Hungarians and Cubans are about as compatible as fried plantains and goulash.
Natascha McElhone is certainly fetching as an Englishwoman fighting alongside the Hungarian rebels, but like the only other woman to pluck Jack's heartstrings in 40 years up against the KGB — Alexandra Maria Lara as a regal ballet dancer who feeds information to the CIA from inside Berlin's Russian sector — she feels stereotypical.
It may not be a recommendation exactly, but one thing "The Company" does well is convey how long the Cold War lasted. As Mr. Keaton's Angleton keeps muttering during the final episode, it takes "the patience of a saint" to work in counterespionage. Having once been betrayed by his closest friend, the jaunty, stuttering Kim Philby (Tom Hollander), Angleton dedicates himself to never being fooled again, even as the film repeats the lesson that the people closest to you are often the ones you know least well. His obsessive belief in the presence of a mole high up in the CIA isn't vindicated until he has already retired, but when vindication finally comes, it's the most cathartic moment of the film.
Wreathed in cigarette smoke, papery cheeks lined like an indecipherable map of longed-for connections, Mr. Keaton gives us a moving and memorable image of a spymaster teetering on the brink of insanity, yet somehow holding fast to a shred of truth. Emotionally and intellectually, he pulls this sprawling, often bloated miniseries together, and provides it with a soul.
