DVDFile

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / 2007 / 286 Minutes / Unrated
Street Date: October 23, 2007

Director Ridley Scott was drawn to Robert Littell’s novel The Company and was considering directing an adaptation for the big screen.  But at 892 pages, the density of the original material simply didn’t lend itself to a two hour film.  However, it was perfect for a three-part 286-minute miniseries.  Ridley Scott and brother Tony became executive producers, Ken Nolan was hired to author the teleplay, and Mikael Salomon was tapped to direct.  The filmmakers then recruited film actors for the principal roles.

The miniseries portrays the lives of three friends who were former classmates at Yale University: Jack McAuliffe (Chris O’Donnell), Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola), and Yevgeny Tsipin (Rory Cochrane).  The background is the forty-year cold war, from the development of nuclear rivalry after World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Upon graduation, McAuliffe and Kritzky are recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency.  Tsipin, having been educated abroad, returns to Soviet Russia and is recruited by the KGB.  Although these three men will interact directly and indirectly for decades, the prime focus is on McAuliffe.

During his first assignment in post-war Berlin, McAuliffe becomes the protégé of Harvey Torriti (Alfred Molina), who’s a borderline alcoholic career field operative with an infallible nose for deceit.  He’s known as the Sorcerer.  It’s in the first of the miniseries’ three parts that McAuliffe refines his tradecraft and learns the painful lessons of losing assets to the other side.  And it’s just such a loss that persuades Torriti that there must be a mole within the Company. 

It becomes clear that the complexity of strategy, moves and countermoves, and plots within plots, requires the mind of a chess master.  We meet eccentric intellects on both sides.  KGB head Starik Zhilov (Ulrich Thomsen) expertly infiltrates both the CIA and the British MI5 with double agents.  CIA director of counter-intelligence James Angleton (Michael Keaton), a chain-smoking anal-retentive master of minutia, seems able to deduce reliably the obscure from remarkably tenuous chains of evidence.  And yet, he fails to recognize a mole that has become very close indeed.  It’s unlikely that I’m giving anything away to a readership that’s undoubtedly familiar with the historical ferreting out of Burgess, McClean, and Adrian “Kim” Philby.  But it’s a pyrrhic victory; there is another.

Part two takes us into two initiatives that failed miserably: the Bay of Pigs and the Hungarian uprising.  The first was crushed by Castro.  The second was crushed by Soviet intervention.  Both were failures because of critical information passed along to the Soviets by the remaining CIA mole.  But the focus is not on the internals of the agency, it’s on McAuliffe working in the field, first with the Hungarian rebels, and then with expat Cuban invaders.  We learn firsthand the cruel consequences of betrayal.

The third part deals with the efforts to find and detain the remaining CIA mole.  This is arguably the most intriguing story; it certainly has the greatest emotional resonance.  Angleton believes he’s discovered the mole’s identity thanks to a few tidbits offered by a walk-in defector.  But his credibility is challenged when he can’t break the prisoner and the defector suddenly bolts to Soviet Russia.  What makes this particular episode so interesting is the unrelenting analysis of motivations and the deduction of plots and schemes.  Deception is the name of the game, and no one during the nearly five hours of drama is completely honest.  And that facilitates clever and unpredictable twists and turns that kept me engaged.

I was impressed with the miniseries’ production values, location shooting, good writing, and uniformly excellent cast.  This is the antithesis of any James Bond film.  Spying is hard, dangerous, dirty, uncomfortable, and frequently painful, if not lethal.  There is little glamour; there is the pitting of mind against mind, force against force, and brutality against brutality.  It’s a dark world in which the ends justify the means, and souls are eroded by lives of desperate deception.  You will not find this to be a fast-paced action adventure; the tone and pace are akin to the works of John le Carré or the quiet but strong The Good Shepherd.  Your patience will be rewarded.

The Video: How Do The Discs Look?

The film was captured using Arriflex D-20 high definition cameras, so this presentation is in the original digital cablecast’s 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  The transfer was compressed using the AVC video CODEC.  The filmmakers have desaturated the chroma, giving the series a bleak feel that hints at aging the action or creating an impression of noir.  Fortunately, the many dark scenes, many of which take place under the cover of night, have fine shadow details that don’t obscure.  A little more colorful are the scenes shot in Puerto Rico, the surrogate for Cuba.  Both small object detail and finely grained textures are excellent.  I noticed no white or black crush.  This is simply another fine film-like transfer from Sony.

The Audio: How Do The Discs Sound?

For a cablecast miniseries, the 5.1 audio is surprisingly good.  Then again, both Ridley and Tony Scott appreciate the value of an effective and impressive soundtrack, so perhaps my surprise is misplaced.  The audio is available in both PCM and Dolby Digital.  As you’d expect, I listened to the uncompressed PCM.  The timbre is excellent, with persuasive voices and score.  Surround effects are frequent and enveloping, from ambiance to discrete sounds and pans.  Deep bass punctuates explosions.  My only complaint is that the dynamic range seems a bit constrained.  Gunshots simply don’t have that visceral punch.  Nicely done.

The audio is supported by subtitles in English, English SDH, and French.

The Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Neither of the two supplements is in high definition; both are presented in 480p.  We begin with Declassified: The Origins of The Company (15:46), a featurette that traces the background and history behind the miniseries.  We learn about the difficult task of adapting the huge book into a workable teleplay, including some discussions of the differences between the novel and the film.  The screenwriter talks about his work.  Ridley Scott describes his contribution and involvement.  The principal players describe the nature of their characters and how they fit into the storyline, blending into history and the personal impacts those events had.

The second featurette is The Hidden Hand: The Making of The Company (23:30), which clearly feels like a continuation of the first piece.  We learn about the selection of the director.  There is an interesting section concerning the shooting locations.  The filmmakers tried to be faithful to historical events, and we hear again from the players about their feelings about that period in our history.  We also learn of smaller details, like the aging of the actors with makeup effects and how they all agreed to shave their heads to accommodate the wigs that projected their progressing ages.  The short ends with some philosophizing about the impact of the CIA and its lack of oversight; there is both admiration and admonishment.

And, of course, you’ll find some high definition trailers.  On this set, there are only the Coming to Blu-Ray Promo and a trailer for Spider-Man 3.

Each of the miniseries’ three chapters is organized into ten chapters.

Final Thoughts

I very much enjoyed this more cerebral approach to the spy flick.  A reasonable approach to recent history, I only took exception to the convenient omission of agency abuses.  Failures of noble causes were attributed to betrayals by double agents, but what of the CIA’s complicity in such events as the Iran-Contra scandal?  The miniseries portrays the agency as a force for good, and I would have to agree.  Perhaps the case could be made that agency misuse was caused only by the abuse of power by the executive branch.  That quibble aside, this is an intriguing depiction of some notable milestones in the cold war.  A great transfer, a very fine audio track, and a couple of moderately good supplements make this an easy recommendation.


Here’s a note about the apparent duplicate Buy Guide.  Our I.T. people are hard at work on a large project and have not yet had the time to modify the underlying site database formatting code to accommodate the new 0-to-10 rating scales.  So until they do, for HD on disc, I’ll insert this note and a Buy Guide at the end of the review text and leave the conventional 0-to-5 Buy Guide blank.