Our Kind of Traitor

Description

Susanna White’s vastly entertaining adaptation of John le Carré’s novel involves mild-mannered poetry professor Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor) who becomes embroiled in the defection of a Russian oligarch with a prodigious head for numbers. Vacationing with his beautiful wife Gail, Perry meets the extroverted Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) who invites him to an all-night party and later challenges him to a tennis match. There’s a hidden motive in these overtures of friendship—the Russian wants to defect and hopes that Perry can broker a deal such that the British government will secure the safety of Dima and his family. Thus begins a globetrotting, suspense-ridden drama involving the unscrupulous machinations of money launderers, bankers and Secret Service bureaucracy where the criminally minded Dima emerges as the most heroic of antiheroes. As MI6 official Hector (Homeland’s Damian Lewis) puts it, “Who cares what the Russians do as long as they spend their money here?,” a question that underlines the various hypocrisies characterized in the film. Skarsgård steals every scene he’s in while McGregor is terrific as the mild-mannered teacher keen for adventure. Faithfully following le Carré’s smart and tricky novel, screenwriter Hossein Amini (The Two Faces of January, SFIFF 2014) tracks the action from Marrakech to the Swiss Alps and all centers of power in between. —Rod Armstrong

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