‘Wasp Network’: The Cuban Five Spy For Castro In Filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ Uneven Espionage Thriller [Venice Review]

Oliver Assayas’ “Wasp Network“ is an intriguing caper-style political drama, featuring a starry ensemble cast and some compelling material, which, unfortunately, outstays its welcome in a major way. Focusing on a contentious era of Cuban espionage during the 1990s, its main characters are several real-life members of the Cuban Five, who infiltrated anti-Castro groups to take down terrorists in the name of Fidel. The US government looked the other way, for the most part—until it suited them not to.

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After the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent loss of Cuba’s main economic support, defectors and anti-Castro groups—sensing a weakening of the communist regime—began to amp up militant actions against the country. These actions even extend to planting bombs in tourist areas in Havana. When pilot and family man Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramírez) defects to Miami, his wife Olga (Penélope Cruz) feels deeply betrayed. “Wasp Network” has a deep bench of actors, including Gael García Bernal as a Cuban patriot and “Narcos” star Wagner Moura as an unsavory and self-serving spy. Most of the network was based in Miami; its participants would fly small aircraft into Cuban airspace to dispense messages and help other refugees on their way to the states. This was also tied up in drug smuggling, to a large extent, only further complicating matters.

There’s intricate, and then there’s messy. In a story of unspooling complexity and multiple double-crosses, the biggest trouble with “Wasp Network” is that it can be flat-out confusing. A viewer with no prior knowledge of the situation is thrust into a web of ideological oppositions and political splinter groups—each with their own acronym—and a number of shady, powerful figures who are easy to confuse. Meanwhile, explanatory voiceovers appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. It’s a clear indicator that Assayas has front-loaded too much information into his film; it’s almost as if he’s tried to squeeze a series of Wikipedia pages into each section of voiceover. 

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Sometimes it works. Assayas cleverly drips and withholds information, upending expectations by keeping audiences in the dark. It’s a smart way to show us how wives and women were treated as afterthoughts in this situation, but it also makes the narrative even more baffling. The audience has to spend far too much time working the double-crosses and secret agendas out. While a mid-film twist proves suitably shocking, that shock soon fades into vague confusion again—and after a while, that gives way to boredom. 

Cruz has been making a habit just lately of being the best thing in her movies, and this is probably also true of “Wasp Network,” in spite of a narrative predominantly interested in the actions of her husband. She’s a grounding, maternal presence providing a pragmatic counter to her idealistic husband while never simply acquiescing to his demands or beliefs. The emotional power provided by Ramirez and Cruz is worth mentioning, as a family continually torn apart by the political upheaval of their lives. But this power is stunted, too, by the messiness of Assayas’ delivery, and his refusal to clean up the tangled narrative threads that his film leaves hanging. [C-]

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