Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 22, 2004 | | Summary | A Flawed but Intense Film of Espionage, Intrigue and History | Content
 | THE INNOCENT is a little known movie released in 1995 and only just now available on DVD. For those who are fans of novelist Ian McEwan stories (The Atonement, Amsterdam, Enduring Love, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, etc) then this foray into screenwriting based on his own 1989 novel by the same name will be of great interest. Based on a true bit of history, the story takes place in 1954 when the British and Americans were carrying on a clandestine partnership in digging a tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall to gain access to the buried telephone lines that provided wire tapping of Russian communications. The CIA agent in charge of the American division is Bob (played by a very oddly cast Anthony Hopkins) who receives the genteel and innocent 25-year-old British soldier Leonard (Campbell Scott) as a technician to direct the wire-taping mission. Leonard is the true 'guileless fool', a wide eyed virgin on his first undercover military mission and eventually his first affair with an older German woman Maria (Isabella Rossellini), a woman with a dubious past, who eventually involves him in the murder of her husband Otto (Ronald Nitschke) and his rather Grand Guignol disposal. Now completely trapped by the circumstances of the Cold War and his inadvertent entry into espionage, Leonard is forced to escape to England in a way that involves Maria and Bob and the fact that the Russians discover the intrigue. The film ends with a return of Leonard to the Berlin of 1989 when the Berlin Wall come down: the intervening 25 years have taken their toll on all concerned.
The film is very well directed by John Schlesinger and while Campbell and Rossellini are excellent, Hopkins as a brash American CIA agent seems oddly miscast. He is a fine actor and is able to bring off his multifaceted role well, but just seems uncomfortable and makes us feel that. A movie well worth your attention, especially if you happen to love Ian McEwan's elegant way with words and story line. |
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