Now, of course you are waiting for the big “but,’’ the big disappointment. What I’m delivering here, though, is a medium-size “but,’’ since “Page Eight’’ isn’t nearly a mess. The movie, which premieres on Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channel 2, is a drama about the British intelligence community, with Nighy as a national security bureaucrat who is almost pathologically unable to trust anyone. The acting is uniformly excellent, including Fiennes as a nasty prime minister, and the ideas that swim through the script are complex and thought-provoking. If you watch, you won’t ever feel as though your intelligence is being underestimated.
But - here we go - I found “Page Eight’’ oddly tedious and stilted. While the cast is clearly relishing the dialogue and its finely crafted indirection, I was glazing over. Hare seems to be completely unwilling to lightly fill in his script with explication for us, or to infuse a sense of warmth in between any of the lines. It’s all as cold as Nighy’s Johnny Worricker, when he tells his artist daughter about the off-putting despair that he sees in her work. As the viewer of Hare’s story, I felt stuck on the outside, while the characters went through their paces secretly understanding everything that was at stake.
There are two strands to the action. One involves Johnny’s personal life, which is largely empty. When a lively neighbor - Weisz’s Nancy, a book editor - expresses interest in him, he is stubbornly suspicious. Between his disastrous romantic history, and his inability to express himself tenderly to his daughter, he has become a numbed-out bureaucrat with little possibility of ever finding love. He takes pleasure only from art and culture, moments that allow Nighy to bring a much-needed sense of humanity to his character. Johnny’s one playful relationship is with his boss, Gambon’s Benedict Baron, who teases him with straight-faced affection.
