Spy series script not committed to the cause, betraying Baron Cohen’s serious-acting mission

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This article was published 14/09/2019 (2576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It can be interesting to watch comedians take on dramatic roles. Often there’s an ache or an edge to their comedy that makes it into the drama.

Robin Williams’ comedy always had a certain neediness, and that quality informed his serious portrayals both good (One Hour Photo) and bad (Patch Adams). Adam Sandler’s comedic knack for frustration, irritation and outright rage has been transmuted, by skilled directors, into the tremendous sadness of anger turned inward (Punch Drunk Love, The Meyerowitz Stories).

Sacha Baron Cohen is known for extreme cringe comedy, which at its worst is unwatchable and at its best is revolutionary performance art. He takes on outlandish personae — Ali G, Borat, Bruno — and then gets into unscripted encounters with actual people. He’s ambushed everyone from Noam Chomsky to Dick Cheney, using improvised faux-idiocy to corner and coax people into revealing themselves. The results are often illuminating and/or appalling.

In The Spy, a six-episode limited series now streaming on Netflix, Baron Cohen is getting serious with the fact-based story of Eli Cohen, an Egyptian-born Jew who became an Israeli agent in the 1960s. This file clerk and family man pretended to be a flashy, high-living import-exporter named Kamel Amin Thaabet, eventually infiltrating the Syrian government and military.

As many critics have pointed out, Baron Cohen is basically exploring espionage as improv.

In a safehouse in Zurich, we watch Eli shed one identity and take on another, his real clothes hanging in one closet and his costumes — the slick, expensive suits of Kamel — hanging in another.

Eli has been trained by his handler Dan Peleg (Noah Emmerich of The Americans, struggling mightily with the Israeli accent) and given strict orders to avoid risks. Once he’s in the field, though, setting up his cover in Buenos Aires and later moving to Damascus, he’s on his own. Like any good improv artist, he has to trust his instincts. He has to be in the moment. He has to respond “Yes, and…” — as the improv kids like to say —when a friend proposes a dangerous infiltration of a secure Syrian military site.

As with Baron Cohen’s comic process, Eli uses elaborate falsehoods to uncover the truth. But Eli’s improvisations have life or death consequences. As one of his handlers tells him as he embarks on his double life, he has to stop thinking of himself as Eli: “You are either Kamel, or you’re dead.”

Baron Cohen, who is listed as an executive producer on The Spy, clearly wants to claim these higher stakes. He’s already tried the espionage genre as crass, rude raunch comedy in The Brothers Grimsby. In The Spy he’s playing it straight.

There is a moment at the beginning of the show when a hardcore Baron Cohen fan might be distracted by Eli’s Borat-flashback-inducing moustache. The script almost seems to acknowledge this possibility, with Eli’s wife, Nadia (Hadar Ratzon Rotem), teasing him about his “silly moustache.”

Baron Cohen quickly dispels anything remotely Borat-like with a committed and credible dramatic performance. He easily embodies the room-filling flair that allows Eli to draw in Syrian military and government officials – no surprise there — but he also works in subtler dramatic shades, suggesting the psychological strain and isolation of living undercover.

Unfortunately, The Spy lacks the complexity to back up Baron Cohen’s serious ambitions. Creator Gideon Raff (the man behind Prisoners of War, the Israeli series that inspired Homeland) never really gets to the core of his subject.

The series isn’t about the tortured geopolitics of the region, or even much about the intricate suspense of spycraft. Like The Americans, The Spy is really about the nature of identity. The series often juxtaposes the worlds of Nadia and Eli, as she goes through the domestic routines of work and childcare in Tel Aviv while he lives it up at his bachelor pad as “our man in Damascus,” splashing around money and throwing sex parties. What happens to Eli when he takes on the words, the actions, even the feelings of another man for months at a time? Who does he become?

The Spy isn’t quite willing to follow up these dark questions, downplaying both the conflicted motivations and terrible emotional costs of Eli’s work.

“I’ve never met anyone so sure of his abilities and so eager to prove he could do it,” Dan says of Eli at one point.

The same could apply to Baron Cohen, who’s eager to prove himself as a serious leading man. He’s always taken risks with his comedy, and he wants to take risks here. Too often, however, the scripting plays its safe.