Black Doves
In Keira Knightley’s best roles, there’s always a certain itchiness to her performance. It gives the characters she plays, no matter how confident seeming on the surface, the suggestion of a dose of imposter syndrome. It’s a quality that makes her a natural for an espionage agent who may have gone a bit emotionally soft but remains quite good at acts of physical brutality. Thus, she’s a perfect fit as Helen Webb, one of the titular Black Doves of the new Netflix series. Having taken an undercover job years earlier, Helen has fully committed to the bit. She’s married her target, British Secretary of State for Defence Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), and they’ve had two kids. She still sends along information to her handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire, wonderfully ice-cold), but things have slowed down considerably. Perhaps that boredom—or the fact that she married for espionage, not love—led to her affair with Jason (Andrew Koji), a civil servant whose assassination reveals a much larger conspiracy involving the CIA, a Chinese diplomat, and an assortment of underworld figures. Things get nasty and complicated so quickly that Reed has no choice but to bring in Sam (Ben Whishaw), a trigger man and friend of Helen’s living in self-imposed exile abroad. "What's cooler than being cool?" "Ice cold!" "No, I'm sorry. The answer is Sarah Lancashire." (Ludovic Robert/Netflix) If Knightley’s performance plays to her familiar—if too often underestimated skills—Whishaw’s initially dead-eye turn as an assassin reveals no skills in the actor’s toolbox. Even as he warms in the presence of his spy friend Helen and an assortment of old “civilian” buddies and romances, there’s a hollowness to him. Later revelations shed light on the why of it—revelations that the show might’ve been better to skip—but Whishaw repeatedly emphasizes something in the hitman has dried up and blown away. Continue Reading →