Anytime I can see a low-key spy flick that has little or no guns, sex or gadgets in it I’m happy. I find the real workings of intelligence communities amazing and am obsessed with the Cold War. As a movie this is engaging and interesting, if a little uninspired in its depiction of the world leaders involved. But the key relationships – between Vetrov and his family, Vetrov and Pierre, Pierre and his family – are emotionally resonant and truthful.

However, I find it really interesting that it makes certain concessions to commercialism that are far from the truth of the event.

First of all the film wants you to feel sympathetic for Vetrov, who was a fierce alcoholic, so it cuts away from that night of drinking champagne in his car with his mistress, and immediately jumps to him being in KGB custody. The truth is, he stabbed his mistress that night, as well as another man, in a drunken paranoid episode (he chased her down as she tried to escape). It was while in prison for this offense that he starting writing letters to friends and family about being a part of “something big”. As a highly placed KGB agent, he should have known that all his letters were being monitored and this suggests that he wanted to get caught. It was these letters that led to KGB involvement in his case. So the notion of him being the wolf that protects the cubs is suspect (yes, we get four mentions of this in the movie as well as an image of a wolf watching him be marched off to be shot – subtle) whether the cubs are either Pierre’s family or his own family. The only “cubs” Vetrov’s really protecting here are the Russian people from an all powerful, ill-conceived state government. And that metaphor actually is a little patronizing if you ask me.

I’m no lover of American policy in the world abroad, particularly during the Cold War, and I think Reagan was a war criminal, so I find it interesting that I’m about to call this a piece of French propaganda. The film depicts the actions of the Americans in response to Vetrov’s intelligence as being the thing that outed him to the KGB (mainly the round up of KGB operatives in the US). But in fact it was the US who used the information gained by the French in a much more subtle and calculating way than the French did. They created a massive operation that provided the Soviets with faulty data and sabotaged technology. It was the French who immediately rounded up the Russian spies in their midst and sent them packing, alerting the KGB to the notion that something was up.

Lastly the film plays fast and loose with one of the most interesting historical truths of the whole event. Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB agent who imprisons and questions Vetrov and then is shown to be a double agent for the US at the end of the film, is completely misrepresented. His defection to the USA, depicted in the film, was faked in real life. He was a double agent working for Moscow the entire time and fed the US false information. He eventually escaped back to the USSR and claimed he had been kidnapped and drugged by the USA. For his infiltration he received The Order of the Red Star. He was not the “key” player in a larger American plan as is suggested in the film, but simply a highly successful double agent.

So the film mostly works as a human drama, but as a piece of history, it actually negates just how crazy and complicated the Cold War, and this case in particular, was. It engages in some US bashing (which we deserve, just not for this particular case) and white washes its protagonist to make him more sympathetic. Some of these choices are important for the structure and flow of the film. Some are artistically cowardly.

So it goes.