Our Kind of Traitor is the latest John le Carré adaptation for the big screen, and while it is efficient and moderated like a good English thriller should be, it lacks the extra punch that is housed just beneath the surface of its international crime plot.The film is directed by Susanna White, who has shown a proclivity for effective, understated British drama-her 2005 Bleak House series for BBC is one of the better Dicken’s adaptations in recent years. But that impulse tends to undercut Our Kind of Traitor, which could have used a bit more action and energy. As it stands, le Carré’s story of corruption in international banking, a remorseful Russian mobster and an unwitting British pleb turned hero adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
Chief among those parts is the acting. This is a top flight cast (British drama’s deserve no less), and the principals each provide dynamic performances in this story and character driven picture. The traitor of the title is Dima (Stellan Skarsgård), a former bookkeeper for the Russian Mafia who is trying to extract himself and his family from the mob life. To do so, Dima enlists the help of a British tourist he encounters on vacation. Perry (Ewan McGregor) agrees to carry a flash drive to the UK government, and before you know it he and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) are tangled up in an international crime investigation being led by an agent named Hector (Damian Lewis).
Hector is trying to take down a British MP for his role in opening a new bank for European blood money, and he plans to use Perry as a pawn and Dima’s information as leverage to expose his government’s willingness to turn a blind-eye to bad business partners. Bad business partners, after all, can still make for good business, and Hector’s superiors have no interest in troubling a successful MP.
Director White and her writer Hossein Amini hew closely to their drama of this story, and largely forego the potential critique that comes with financial scandal. Instead they look for juicier delights in Dima’s desire to save his family, the Russian mob’s pursuit of the Dima, and Perry’s empathy for a former mob man.
If White and Amini had pushed some more life into Perry and Gail’s marriage (it’s on the rocks, they’re on vacation trying to save it), I might have been able to sink deeper into the emotional stakes of the plot. But as it stands, White holds too much back and builds with too much decorum, relying on fear and a chase across Europe to stand-in for depth. The necessary tension to support the film’s conclusion never materializes. Instead, White’s direction implies empathy through speeches and desperation (which Skarsgård nails), while viewers are distracted by the skillfully orchestrated scenes and beautifully captured landscapes of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle.
There are worse sins, of course, than making a beautiful movie well and failing to connect with the character’s emotional depth. But given the timing, this movie could have landed like a indignant slap across Britain’s face. Opening a week after Brexit, it’s a shame that Our Kind of Traitor doesn’t feel more relevant. That could have been a powerful story: a British couple putting their lives at risk to save a family of foreign strangers.
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