Cochrane Joins 'The Company'

The Company is a TNT mini-series about 40 years of danger and mystery in the CIA.

This three-part mini-series, which is airing on three consecutive Sundays on TNT, is based on Robert Littell's novel of the same name. Tom Shales of the Washington Post described The Company as "a doom-and-gloomy fictionalized history of the CIA and 40 years of secret meetings, coded messages, false identities, poisoned drinks and cloaks and daggers by the score." According to UGO's Brian Tallerico, each of the three sections of the mini-series "tries to be its own film with its own setting and stand-alone plot." Because of this, Tallerico described the second and third segments as "more like sequels to the first night than continuations of one serial story like your average mini-series."

Tallerico described the first part of the mini-series, which airs this week, as the "drama." This segment introduces the major characters. James Jesus Angleton (Michael Keaton) is a counterintelligence chief for the CIA, and he is trying to find a mole within the organization. Alfred Molina plays The Sorcerer, a man who, along with Jack McAuliffe (Chris O'Donnell), is working to discover who is disrupting CIA missions. Jack McAuliffe and Leo Kritzky (Alessandro Nivola) are friends from Yale who join the CIA. Another of their friends from school, a Russian exchange student named Yevgeny Tsipin (former CSI: Miami star Rory Cochrane), joins the KGB. All three of these young men are forced to deal with the sacrifices they must make and the effect that their jobs have on themselves and the women in their lives.

The second part of the mini-series is "the most action-driven and the one most clearly about disillusionment with the American government," according to Tallerico. This episode features real events: the Hungarian revolution and the Bay of Pigs. Both of these ill-fated situations serve to illustrate Shales' assertion that The Company "is by no means a chronicle of CIA triumphs."

The final installment of the mini-series ties the story together. The actors were aged with make-up to portray their characters 40 years in the future. The setting is at the climax of the Cold War, and the identity of the mole is revealed.

Overall, Shale described The Company as a "deluxe-looking docudrama, lavish and at times even semi-spectacular." Although reality and fiction are blended together for the movie, Marcus Eliason from The Cincinnati Post suggested that the viewers "forget about the history books and enjoy the thrills, mysteries, pathos and international cast offered by this ambitious production." One member of the cast that will be notable to fans of CSI: Miami is Rory Cochrane, the man who once played Tim Speedle on the CBS drama. Eliason said that fans would find Cochrane's role as Tsipin to be a "revelation." Tsipin, he said, is the "saddest character of the story - a waiflike figure skulking around pay phones, deciphering coded messages in his room late at night, riding the Washington subway alone. When he finally goes home, it's to a Russia where the ideology he served is dead and the woman he loved has spent years in the gulag."

Visit the official page for The Company at the TNT website. Reviews for the mini-series can be found at The Washington Post, UGO, The LA Times and The Cincinnati Post

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