Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

Susanna White's adaptation of John le Carré's 2010 novel arrives with the quiet competence of a well-tailored suit and the same reluctance to make a scene. A young Oxford academic and his attorney girlfriend, holidaying in Morocco, stumble into the orbit of a Russian oligarch who wants a tennis partner and, eventually, a courier. The machinery that follows is familiar: MI6, a corrupt minister, a bank that exists to launder the proceeds of other people's misery. White directs with restraint. The film prefers a raised eyebrow to a raised voice, which is its own kind of virtue in a genre that often mistakes volume for stakes.

The political register here is cynical but narrow. Money laundering, purchased politicians, and an unholy alliance between the City and the intelligence services all receive a cold stare, and there is a genuine sourness in the film's view of oligarchic wealth. It aims its contempt at individuals, however, not at the system that produces them. Naomie Harris's Gail proves resourceful when the plot requires a family to be retrieved from a French apartment, and she handles the assignment with the brisk efficiency of someone who has read the script. Her competence is the competence of the genre. It carries no argument about anything larger.

Where the film is most striking is in what it declines to notice. Dima's eidetic memory is a mechanism for storing account numbers, nothing more. The story moves through Morocco, London, Paris, and the Alps without a single glance at the world those places contain beyond their function as backdrops. Race never enters the frame as a subject, the climate never enters it at all, and the bodies on screen are bodies only insofar as they can be shot at or mourned. It is a film that shows instead of lecturing, and in an era of cinema that increasingly treats the audience as a classroom, that restraint deserves a modest nod of respect.