fastidium

Night Two
In Night One of The Company, we meet one of the main characters, Jack McAuliffe (Chris O’Donnell), as a young CIA operative. He falls in love with a ballet dancer named Lili (Alexandra Maria Lara) who is a go-between for the CIA and an Russian informant in Berlin just after World War II but prior to the Berlin Wall going up. The love affair does not go well for reasons that I won’t tell here in case you haven’t seen it yet.

On Night Two of The Company, Jack is first in Hungary in 1956 just prior to the revolution and then, in the second half, is assigned to help Cuban rebels prepare to retake their country from Castro five years later. In the first part, he is taken prisoner by the Allamvedelmi Hatosag (AVH), the Hungarian secret police, while helping the resistance movement. He’s come to tell them to put off their revolution because the United States government cannot help at this point. The two prominent figures in the revolution, a poet named Arpad Zelk (Misel Maticevic) and a English woman who’s husband was murdered by the AVH (Natascha McElhone) are disillusioned by the news, citing the fact that the revolution is begun and nobody can stop it.

The Company has not disappointed me in the least. The only drawback is that some of the scenes of CIA headquarters in Washington seems to involve some historical revision. I’m no expert here but it sounded weird to hear them talk about a predicted Iron Curtain. They talk about it as if it was certain to happen that the Soviet Union was going to close itself off from the world. I realize that the Soviet Union was always closed off to some degree but the analysts in the 1950’s CIA seem certain that the USSR will put up the Berlin Wall and close itself off from the rest of the world. Am I right here? I would think that no one could have been certain of this happening at the time, but then … this is the CIA.

The best scene from Night Two was when Harvey Torriti (Alfred Molina), code-named Sorcerer, meets with a KBG agent on the middle of a frozen lake to discuss Jack’s release. This isn’t an exact quote but Torriti is trying to show the difference between the CIA and the KBG by saying somethink like “We’re not mafia, we’re civilize organizations that happen to be on different sides of the divide on what makes free elections free, being woken up in the middle of the night and ending up in a Siberian prison. You know, that sort of thing.”

The original story for The Company comes from the book by the same title by Robert Littell. The casting for The Company is very good: Chris O’Donnell, Alfred Molina, and Michael Keaton were excellent choices for their roles. The screen writer is Ken Nolan, the guy who brought the book Black Hawk Down to the big screen.

Also: Review of The Company at NY Times