The Spy Who Didn't Come in from the cold: Restless

The BBC/Sundance two-part movie Restless is a very good British spy movie, if you go in for that sort of thing - I don't especially, but many do and I can see that this is a good contemporary take on the genre. It's a double-period-piece movie, with the "present" set in 1976, as a young woman (Dockery, apparently well known from Downtown Abbey) and her son visit aging mom, Charlotte Rampling, in her country house - Mom is clearly disturbed and believes people are watching her from the woods. It appears we're entering Stephen King movie, or perhaps a movie about the boundaries of mental illness (is the mom crazy? or does she see and know something that others don't?), but pretty quickly we learn she right, people are watching her (I think it would have been stronger had we been left in doubt longer, but so be it) - and then we learn why: She has written a mss. that she gives to daughter to read, and for the rest of the movie we jump back and forth between her past and the 1976 present. What we learn: she is a Russian-born Brit (extremely unlikely that she could or would keep this from her adult daughter till now) who gets recruited into a British spy network. Their mission, in the late 1930s/early 1940s, is to encourage U.S. entry into the World War, through means of subterfuge. (I thought for once I was going to be watching a BBC movie that did not take place during one of the world wars - fooled me!) But things get complicated, people all around her are getting knocked off, and it becomes evident there's some kind of double agent - doesn't take us that long to figure out who - that wants to ruin the mission. Exactly why this agent would still be trying to bump off the woman 30 years after the war - and why he hasn't been able to do so, for that matter - is never exactly clear, though there's a hint at the end that maybe the Mom is a little dotty and has been imagining at least some of the supposed threats against her. As with so many good spy movies, it's a lot of fun along the way and it keeps you guessing, thinking, trying to figure out the plot. And yet - as with so many spy movies, at the end, if you step back, you have to wonder whether any of this was probably, or even possible. (spoiler here): I mean, seriously, a Soviet agent thinks he can prevent U.S. entry into the war through a kooky scheme to knock off British agents and make them look like German double-agents...? The U.S. was going to enter, or not, based on U.S. interests - plain and simple. The movie has all the great production values we've come to expect from BBC productions: great period re-creations, fine acting; the woman playing the younger version of the spy, Haley Atwell, is really good and very appealing - largely unknown to date but I think not for long.