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. 

Spies in a world shorn of honor

Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard enrich Our Kind of Traitor, an engaging adaptation of a John le Carre thriller.

Almost any John le Carre novel has the potential to yield an intelligent, big-screen thriller. Adapted from a 2010 le Carre novel, Our Kind of Traitor proves the point, deftly luring us into a world populated by Russian mobsters, British academics, and British intelligence agents, all of them operating against backdrops that extend from Marrakech to Paris.

Perfectly timed to compete with the bloated drivel of summer, Our Kind of Traitor reminded me of the kind of movie pleasures I'd lately been missing, namely characters who find themselves in situations they couldn't possibly have anticipated and which prove morally taxing.

Early on, we meet Perry (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomi Harris), a couple vacationing in Marrakech in hopes of reviving a sagging marriage. Self-sufficient professionals, Perry and Gail are dining in a restaurant when Gail abruptly leaves to handle a business matter.

Left alone, Perry is approached by a convivial Russian (Stellan Skarsgard) who invites him to have a drink with his companions, a surly looking bunch. Perry reluctantly accepts, and soon finds himself accompanying Skarsgard's Dima to a party full of temptations, mostly in the form of drugs and women.

Because Dima belongs to the Russian mafia, these temptations come with obvious forebodings: Perry's crude, tattooed associates make no attempt to conceal their carnal appetites.

Full of robust charm and confidence, Dima assures Perry that he needn't be alarmed. He calls him "professor." He overpowers Perry's resistance with loudly expressed charm.

Of course, Dima has an ulterior motive. He wants Perry to transport a memory stick to London. As the man who launders Russian mob money, Dima says he'll name prominent Brits who are in cahoots with Russian crime czars. In return, he wants asylum for himself and his family.

The rest needn't be revealed here, but director Susanna White and screenwriter Hossein Amini treat le Carre's work kindly in a story that focuses on characters who are trying to get out of predicaments rather than penetrate secret inner sanctums.

Once Perry agrees to transport the memory stick, he's in over his head. A British operative (Damian Lewis) pushes Perry to become even more involved, arguing that he holds the key to saving Dima and his family.

Of course, betrayals and bureaucratic fumbles abound, as well as subterranean motivations in which money trumps anything resembling patriotism or honor.

In Dima, Our Kind of Traitor finds a terrific character. Entirely engaging, ebullient and tough, Dima makes no bones about having dirty hands. Yet, we understand Perry's fascination with him. Dina suggests something bigger and more life-affirming than his circumstances might have us believe, a deep understanding of the world's ways. He also knows how to use truth as weapon.

But it's not only plot and performance -- McGregor's best in a while -- that makes Our Kind of Traitor so intriguing; it's the movie's knowledge, acquired from le Carre, that the rot of barbarism can be found beneath the civilized veneer of societies that run on murderous greed. That attitude carries us past the movie's improbabilities and coincidences -- if not to greatness then at least to sustained interest.

In le Carre's fallen world, as made clear in the movie's gripping opening, there's always a chance that the purity of a snow-covered field will be stained with the blood of a beautiful innocent.

Another helping of John le Carre

In A Most Wanted Man, author John le Carre shifts his espionage focus to Hamburg and Berlin. With the Cold War receding into memory, le Carre continues to find other milieus in which he can examine the chilly world of men and women who earn their living plying history's back channels.

Director Anton Corbijn tries to respect the tone and intricacies of le Carre's informed imagination, immersing us in a complex story built around German spy Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

As head of a special unit, Bachmann spends his time keeping tabs on Hamburg's radical Muslims. He hopes that he can uncover terrorist plots as he moves through a shadowy world that he doesn't always understand. Who could?

We're in a post 9/11 environment: The movie begins several years after Hamburg played home to Mohamed Atta, one of the leaders of the World Trade Center attack.

Not without reason, Bachmann considers himself a savvy guy. He's seen plenty, and he's not likely to be bested by anyone. He's a bit disheveled, but he's knowing and efficient, and has a deep mistrust of bureaucracy -- anyone's.

The movie starts when Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Chechen/Russian arrives in Hamburg. A devout Muslim, Issa may be dangerous or maybe he's merely a pawn in someone's plan to lure and catch a bigger fish.

A German immigration lawyer (Rachel McAdams) tries to help Issa gain permanent residency in Germany. They approach a German banker (Willem Dafoe) to gain access to a substantial bank account left by Issa's father, a bad actor in the Russian criminal world.

The movie's cast of characters also includes Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), a high-profile spokesman for the German Muslim community, and a cagey CIA agent (Robin Wright), who tries to work her way into Bachmann's plans.

Corbijn (Control and The American) doesn't totally conquer le Carre's complicated plot, the movie's pacing can become turgid, and the story might have been better served with a German actress in the role played by McAdams.

Still, the payoff perfectly reflects le Carre's cynical intelligence, a rueful defeatism that emanates from too keen a knowledge of the many ways in which people betray one another.

I wish it weren't so, but, for me at least, the fact that Hoffman's no longer with us imbued A Man Most Wanted with unintended eeriness, a sense that perhaps, in the end, life trumped any performance the gifted actor could give.

Put another way, it's difficult not to mourn the fact that A Man Most Wanted should have been one more Hoffman movie among many more to come.

'Tinker, Tailor' has mood to spare

It may not always be crystal clear, but Tinker, Tailor has plenty to recommend it.

I admit it. I sometimes became confused watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a big-screen adaptation of John Le Carre’s 1974 novel. Frustrating? Yes, but there also were times when I found the movie so atmospherically right I didn’t care whether I could dot every “i” or cross every “t” in Le Carre’s labyrinthine plot.

A bit of background. Dense with character and incident, Le Carre’s novel does not naturally lend itself to adaptation. In 1979, it took the BBC seven episodes to translate Le Carre’s novel into a comprehensible drama. The great Alec Guinness starred as George Smiley, the world’s least emotive spy.

Those familiar either with the novel or the BBC series immediately will know that screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan faced a monumental task. Fair to say, they haven’t entirely succeeded in taming Le Carre’s novel.

But in the case of Tinker, Tailor, mood and background may be as important as a plot that, in its overall arc, is easy enough to follow.

Here’s the gist: We’re nearing the end of the Cold War. The British intelligence agency – known to its employees as The Circus – is in the midst of a power shift. A group of rebellious spies is trying to unseat the agency head, known as Control (John Hurt). They succeed in ousting Control, and his most reliable operative, George Smiley (Gary Oldman). Control subsequently dies.

All of this turmoil begins when Control initiates a search for a mole who has penetrated the highest levels of British intelligence.

In keeping with the feeling of institutional decline, Tomas Alfredson -- who directed the terrific Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In – gives the proceedings a bracingly severe tone. From the start, it’s clear that Alfredson has total command of the movie’s look.

Following the story isn’t made easier by the fact that the screenplay employs a flashback structure that can be disorienting. And the screenplay’s refusal to explain any of its spy jargon doesn’t help either.

But I doubt whether you’ll find a better supporting cast in any movie this year. Populating the spy ranks are intelligence bureaucrats played by Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones and David Hencik, all of whom are superb.

And in Hurt, Alfredson has found an actor whose weathered face does as much to suggest institutional collapse as any plot developments could. Hurt crops up at the beginning and in some flashback scenes, and he gives the movie a cynical weight that's indispensable.

Then there’s Oldman, whose restrained performance as Smiley has been praised in the British press and elsewhere. To play Smiley, Oldman slows his delivery and explores the lower octaves in his vocal range.

He can be brilliant. A scene in which a drunken Smiley reenacts a long-ago interrogation of a top and much-feared Soviet agent delivers the goods, and is punctuated by Oldman’s slight wobble when Smiley finishes his story and attempts to stand up.

But there are also times when Oldman’s restraint seems to lack resonance. Smiley has been through a lot. His wife Ann (never seen in full view) has left him. He has endured the endless sordid battles of Cold War spying. He’s been pushed aside by the agency that has dominated his life. He's hardly the kind to vent: Still, I found myself wishing that Oldman had taken us a little past Smiley’s purposefully blank expressions.

Maybe Oldman, who functions as the story’s principal investigator, didn’t want to take anything away from his fellow actors. In a scene in which George meets with Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke), a former intelligence emplyee, Oldman watches while Burke creates a telling portrait of a woman whose romantic impulses were channeled into admiration for her co-workers. It's a great small piece of work.

Although it falls short of perfection, and although, as I’ve said, Tinker, Tailor can be confusing, it always feels intelligent, partly because of Alfredson’s skillful direction and partly because there’s not an actor on screen who doesn't seem smart in some way.

Tinker, Tailor includes sexual betrayals, references to torture and fierce intra-agency battling, but instead of going for cheap thrills, the movie immerses us in a world-weariness that fits its historical moment. Alfredson may not fret about whether viewers sink or swim with the plot: But surely he wants us to swim in the same murky waters in which the characters bob, looking for something to grab hold of.