BEVERLY HILLS - Early in "The Company," TNT's six-hour miniseries about the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, young CIA operative Jack McAuliffe marvels at an older spy's explanation of how to handle a defector who might be a double agent.
"It's a delicate game, isn't it?" asks McAuliffe, played by Chris O'Donnell.
"More than you know," replies super spook Harvey Torriti (Alfred Molina) in a tone that suggests the newly recruited agent may never understand the levels of the chess match between East and West from the end of World War II to the fall of the Soviet Union.
People on the brink
"It seemed like such a fascinating period in the amount of times we got to the brink of something awful and always pulled back, purely because everybody had the same weapons," says Molina, a child of the Cold War whose father fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War that preceded World War II.
Adds Molina: "I think there's an argument for people who get nostalgic about the Cold War. If everyone has such weapons, then does that mean no one's going to use it because they all know mutual destruction is assured?"
The audience for "The Company" - a dark, often engrossing and surprisingly suspenseful (since most will know how such key events as the Bay of Pigs turn out) film - is likely to split into two groups. There will be those who lived through the times and remember such
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flash points as the Hungarian revolt. Then there will be the young viewers, perhaps unaware of the history that is the underpinning of the film and the Robert Littell novel on which it's based. They may view this series as simply a ripping-good spy yarn not unlike the James Bond movies.
The intent of the filmmakers - screenwriter Ken Nolan ("Black Hawk Down") and director Mikael Salomon ("Band of Brothers") - is to enter the hall of mirrors that is espionage, an often lethal crazy house of disinformation, betrayal and paranoia. At the same time, as O'Donnell ("Grey's Anatomy") suggests, the film aims to shed light on the men (and it was almost all men at the time) who made "personal sacrifices for what they believed in" - only to find themselves trapped in moral ambiguity.
Patriotic and extraordinarily brave, the men on both sides of the game ended up as mere pawns for such ideological warriors as CIA heads Allen Dulles and William Colby on one hand and KGB bosses Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Putin on the other. (All of the real-life figures make appearances either as fully drawn characters or in composite.)
"The Company" (which begins at 8 tonight, TNT) comes along just after a theatrical film to which it will almost be compared: last December's "The Good Shepherd." Directed by Robert DeNiro and starring Matt Dillon, "The Good Shepherd" shares much of the time frame and some of the same real-life characters.
Interestingly, one of the miniseries' executive producers - John Calley - worked on "Shepherd" when he was chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment but eventually rejected that film because the story and script were "rather lugubrious." (Calley was right.)
"It turned out to be a blessing, because I think all of us involved in" the miniseries "are pleased the story could be done in the density of a six-hour format rather than two hours," Calley says.
"The Company" does, in fact, have a sweep and energy that is lacking in "Shepherd." It is richly produced with Puerto Rico standing in for Cuba in the Bay of Pigs sequences and Budapest, Hungary, being used for the scenes in Berlin and, of course, those involving the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
But its best moments are more intimate in scale and driven by some first-rate performances.
O'Donnell's low-key acting style, which has not served him well in some previous roles, is better suited to McAuliffe, who goes from committed young recruit to disillusioned veteran over the six hours. Molina is superb as Torriti, a gruff, blue-collar outsider in the agency's Ivy League boys' club. Rory Cochrane - best-known as Speedle in the early days of "CSI: Miami" - is effective as Yevgeny Tsipin, a Yale classmate of McAuliffe who becomes a KGB operative.
Best of all, though, there's an almost-recognizable Michael Keaton ("Batman") as James "Mother" Angleton, the most controversial and complex spy in American history.
"I always write a back story for my character, and this, for me, was a tad more difficult. While you might think it would be easier because there is an actual back story, I found it more difficult because I had to stay somewhat true to him," Keaton says.
"He was a person who was massively complex."
Angleton, who ran the CIA's black-ops and counterespionage operations for decades, was - depending on which historical interpretation you favor - a genius, a misguided patriot or a paranoid madman. That could give an actor too much, or too little, to work with, but Keaton manages to produce a creepy, utterly engrossing and very nuanced performance.
There are elements to "The Company" that are problematic, particularly in the area of historical veracity.
A few inconsistencies
Molina's Torriti, for example, is clearly the real-life William K. Harvey, the CIA's legendary Berlin station chief known as the Sorcerer. The name change seems to have no purpose. Kim Philby - the top operative for Britain's MI-6 who became the most infamous mole in Cold War history - is called Adrian Philby for no apparent reason. (Screenwriter Nolan says it was "one of the names" Philby used.) And some of the CIA's most egregious failings and flaws during the time are barely mentioned or not mentioned at all.
As a history lesson, "The Company" has some considerable shortcomings, but as television, it has few. It evokes an era worth revisiting, reconsiders a time that was an important chapter in our history and gives us a monumental performance by Keaton.
That makes "The Company" worth six hours of your time.
