Fantastic and sensational, Family of Spies tells the kind of story that could only be true. No one would have the nerve to make it up.
The two-part, five-hour CBS movie, airing Sunday at 8 p.m. and Tuesday at 7 p.m. on Ch. 5, is the first major attraction of the February ratings "sweeps." It tells of the notorious Walker spy ring, a family affair that for nearly 20 years sold American military secrets to the Soviet Union.Powers Boothe, who played deranged clergyman Jim Jones a decade ago in another TV miniseries, seems even more sinister as John Walker Jr., the patriarch of the operation and a man seemingly incapable of remorse. Strapped for funds, tired of living on his Navy salary, he walks matter-of-factly into the Soviet Embassy in part one and offers his services.
"I'm interested in selling classified United States documents to the Soviet Union," he tells an embassy official. He says he wants "a long-term contract with monthly payments, depending on what I deliver."
Over the course of that contract, Walker reportedly collected about $750,000 from the U.S.S.R. Experts have said that for what he sold them, the Russians got an incredible bargain.
But in the film, business is so good for Walker that he goes to great lengths to keep the operation going. When his wife, played by Lesley Ann Warren, discovers the truth, Walker coaxes her into coming along on a "drop," when he leaves stolen codes and documents for the Soviets and they pay him in wads of fifty-dollar bills.
That's only the beginning. After retiring from the Navy, Walker urges one of his daughters to join the Army so that she'll have access to secrets. When she marries and gets pregnant, he offers her $500 to put the baby up for adoption so that the interruption in her military career will be minimal.
The daughter, Laura (Lili Taylor), rejects the offer. But Walker convinces his son, Michael (Andrew Lowery), to join the Navy and soon the kid is busy with his tiny little camera. Walker also enlists his brother, and coaxes a friend to join up by telling him the spying is really for an ally, Israel.
Boozer, spouse-abuser, womanizer and, of course, traitor, Walker as played here is the consummate sleaze, a man with no morals to inhibit him. To his friend, he offers a rationalization for the spying:
"Well, we've always been eavesdropping on one another, right? I mean, there've always been spies. Maybe it's better that the two countries don't have any secrets. Maybe it's safer."
Walker's Russian contact, known only in the film as Boris I (played by the intimidating Jeroen Krabbe), expresses the same thought later in the film, no more convincingly than Walker.
It's a critical cliche to say something is "taut," but even at five hours of air time, this movie is. The suspense keeps you spellbound. Richard DeLong Adams based his script on two books about the case: "Family of Spies: Inside the Walker Spy Ring" by Pete Earley, and "I Pledge Allegiance" by Howard Blum.
According to a disclaimer, "Certain events and characters portrayed herein have been fictionalized." But for the most part, "Family of Spies" has a chilling credibility. The director, Stephen Gyllenhaal, knows how to use visual imagery to heighten tension and underline irony, as when Walker meets with his contact near a ferocious-looking dinosaur skeleton at a museum.
Walker stayed in the spy game partly out of fear that the Russians would kill him if he left, the script says. He'd read about the Soviets killing one of their British agents with a poison-tipped umbrella. So in several scenes, Walker runs through Vienna thinking that around any corner there might be an umbrella with his name on it.
Some of the later scenes are repetitious and the very beginning of the movie - in which the director cuts back and forth between Walker on his ship and his wife on shore - is unnecessarily complicated. They forgot Walker's maxim to "keep it simple."
Lesley Ann Warren's performance gets to be too fidgety and tic-filled, too. She plays the wife as an alcoholic and a stammering nervous wreck. Warren overdoes the wallowing, and the portrayal borders on parody.
But Boothe is so mesmerizing that it's unlikely many viewers will bail out before the end, when the FBI finally - after considerable delay - intercepts one of Walker's deliveries and Walker waits in a suburban motel with a gun at his temple.
"Family of Spies" is good to the last drop.