The mystery of Jean le Carre

 

  In The Pigeon Tunnel, a documentary about author Jean le Carre,  director Errol Morris uses a Philip Glass score to create an atmosphere of simmering mystery, not unlike le Carre's much-admired spy novels, the feeling that we're moving toward a disturbing revelation.

   But single revelations aren't le Carre's specialty and Morris doesn't follow that kind of path, either. Although much of le Carre's conversation in Morris' documentary is frank, le Carre keeps some doors securely closed. More on that later.

   Morris never has been particularly interested in talking heads. In this case, dramatic recreations illustrate major moments in le Carre's life, concentrating most notably on the author's relationship with a conman father who also was a profligate gambler.

     Born in 1931 as David Cornwell, le Carre reviews his life, considering influential events (his mother left him and his brother when he was five), and talking about how his work in British intelligence helped shape the fictional worlds he built and the characters who occupy them.

   The film is named for an odd phenomenon le Carre frequently references in his novels. It's also the title of a 2016 memoir published by le Carre, four years before his death at the age of 89.

   As a boy, le Carre accompanied his father on a trip to Monte Carlo where they stayed at a hotel that bred pigeons on its roof. The pigeons would fly through a special tunnel. Upon reaching open air, they became targets for guests who like to shoot.

   The surviving birds returned to their roosts until summoned for the next round of killing, a cruel entrapment that serves as a darkly suggestive metaphor for le Carre. 

   We listen to le Carre talk about themes of betrayal and deceit -- both of self and others, the core of spying and, perhaps for le Carre, an essential human trait. Morris supplements the conversation with images from films adapted from le Carre's novels.

    The film was produced by le Carre's sons (Simon and Stephen Cornwell) but it's not an unalloyed homage; le Carre doesn't present himself as the hero of his story yet he holds much in reserve. He never discusses his role as a father, his name change, or his love life. Morris allows his film to live within these bounds.

      A must for the legion of le Carre fans and an intriguing introduction for those who aren't deeply familiar with le Carre's work, The Pigeon Tunnel struck me as an oddly unsettling work. Le Carre talks about the deceit and betrayal as addictions, the sense that the spy knows what others don't and is privy to secrets that, if known, would make ordinary folks shudder.

      But the joke's on us. No such explanatory secrets pierce the fog of moral ambiguity that interested le Carre. Le Carre remains in charge of his conversation, even as Morris avoids talking-head stasis.

      I don't know if Morris helps us know the "real'' le Carre, but the le Carre we meet emerges as talker of masterful control and, more importantly, a writer of impressively similar bent. 

Errol Morris's tribute to a photographer

Director Errol Morris (The Blue Line, The Fog of War) turns his keen attention to Elsa Dorfman, a portrait photographer living in Cambridge, Mass. Set almost entirely in Dorfman's studio, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography allows the 80-year-old photographer to review her work. She discusses both the famous and ordinary people who stood before her camera of choice, a large-scale Polaroid the size of a small shed. With the special camera no longer available to her -- the original Polaroid company has been dismantled -- Dorfman decided to put the lens cap on her career. Her retirement provides Morris with occasion to review Dorfman's life as a photographer and her relationship with some of her subjects, most notably poet Allen Ginsberg. Dorfman famously photographed Ginsberg in a suit and, then, sans clothing in the same pose. Merely by focusing his attention on Dorfman, Morris honors the easy-going artistry of a career that spanned from 1965 to the present. Initially, Dorfman sold her photos on the streets of Cambridge for $25 a piece. She always made two versions of her 20X24 inch prints, allowing the subject to select one. Dorfman kept the other, marveling at the fact that subjects often selected her least favorite of the two choices. Dorfman's literary connections began when she met Ginsberg as a secretary at a New York publishing house and continued to develop through contacts made at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. B-Side may not rank with Morris' best films, but it stands as an introduction to Dorfman's approach and work. Think of it as a revealing miniature about a woman who made very large photographs.

Rumsfeld passes in review

Director Errol Morris focuses on another secretary of defense.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris seems to like interviewing secretaries of defense.

In 2003's Fog of War, Morris focused on Robert McNamara, highlighting McNamara's role as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War.

The Unknown Known -- which shines Morris's spotlight on Donald Rumsfeld -- might well have been called Defense Secretary 2, an attempt to peer into the mind of another powerful man.

Rumsfeld, of course, presided over the U.S. defense establishment during president George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

A mistake? A waste of lives?

Only time will tell, says Rumsfeld, whose ambitious career often intertwined with that of Dick Cheney.

Rumsfeld is quite different than McNamara, who acknowledged that Vietnam was a mistake, even though his admission arguably qualified as too little, too late.

Less removed in time from Iraq than McNamara was from Vietnam, Rumsfeld remains supremely confident about his decisions. He's never riled by Morris's attempts to catch him in contradictions or lies.

Some of The Unknown Known is devoted to the estimated 20,000 or so memos Rumsfeld wrote while in office. These memos -- called "snowflakes" -- reflect the way Rumsfeld parsed various issues, fretting over "definitions" and "terminology."

Morris persuaded Rumsfeld to read passages from these memos aloud. They'll either strike you as the work of a thoughtful official or a strangely revealing exercise in obfuscation, a man fiddling with language while Iraq burned.

It's pretty clear that Morris remains unimpressed by Rumsfeld's explanations and musings, but Rumsfeld manages to sidestep the intent behind most of Morris's questions. It's also clear that Morris and Rumsfel occupy two different worlds.

Morris, of course, knows how to give a "talking heads" movie pulse. Here, he uses news footage, graphics and a Danny Elfman score as punctuation, a way of keeping the movie from being duller than one of Rumsfeld's memos.

What you think of The Unknown Known may depend on how much time you want to spend trying to figure Rumsfeld out.

He certainly can be cagey: Rumsfeld conveys the impression that Morris (and perhaps all of his critics) have little understanding of the realities he confronted as secretary of defense. He seems to see himself as a well-meaning and thoughtful man whose actions were geared toward accomplishing worthwhile ends in a difficult world.

So why did Rumsfeld want to be in an Errol Morris film anyway?

Rumsfeld tells Morris he has no idea why he agreed to participate in a film with a title based on a Rumsfeldian analysis of what it's possible to know in any given situation and where that knowledge stops.

Maybe Rumsfeld just wanted to prove that he's immune to criticism and that he can't be shaken.

What emerges is a portrait of the ultimate insider, a man of reasonable bearing, who -- many would argue -- presided over unreasonable policies, some of them based on false information.

I'm guessing that most of the audience for The Unknown Known will not be composed of Rumsfeld supporters. I'm also guessing that Rumsfeld probably couldn't care less.

Errol Morris' 'Tabloid,' a real page turner

Joyce McKinney holds the screen in a documentary that's as loopy as it is lurid.

Say this about Errol Morris: The man knows how to keep an audience involved, even when he's just filming talking heads. In his new documentary, Tabloid, Morris finds another fascinating and entirely offbeat subject. Tabloid tells the story of a woman who, in the 1970s, found herself at the center of a pumped-up tabloid scandal in Great Britain.

Although Morris couldn't have foreseen the turmoil that has sprung from the current Murdoch affair, he has made a movie about obsessive love that also serves as a fine introduction to the lurid appetites of British tabloids.

Morris introduces us to Joyce McKinney, a woman who's now in her 60s. When Joyce was a young blonde bombshell, she was accused of kidnapping and raping her Mormon boyfriend, a young man who was on a Mormon mission in England. McKinney, who claims that the so-called "manacled Mormon" was the love of her life, insists that she was trying to rescue the lad from the clutches of a mind-controlling cult.

Kirk Anderson, the alleged kidnapping victim, declined to be interviewed by Morris, who compensates with an extensive helping of McKinney. She comes off as lively, candid and loopy. He also talks with reporters from warring British tabloids and an ex-Mormon who fills in blanks about Mormon beliefs.

I can't say that Tabloid ranks with Morris' best work, movies such as The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time and The Fog of War, but it offers its share of tabloid fun as it whips through a story that touches on pornography, prostitution, bondage and (ready for this?) dog cloning.

Yes, Tabloid can be amusing, but as I reflected back on the movie, I realized something about the power of obsession and how it can distort an entire life. But don't tell that to McKinney: Amazingly, she seems pretty comfortable with her whole whacked-out story.