Errol Morris

THE PIGEON TUNNEL: a great storyteller’s story, told at last

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Photo caption: John le Carré in THE PIGEON TUNNEL. Courtesy of AppleTV.

The espionage novelist John le Carré was one of our greatest storytellers over the past sixty years, and, in The Pigeon Tunnel, the great documentarian Errol Morris cajoles le Carré (real name David Cromwell) to tell his own life story – and what a story it is.

I love the twists and turns in le Carré’s stories, which are set in the world which le Carré himself experienced in his youth as a Cold War British spy. But the underlying theme of le Carré’s work is that his characters are engaged in the highest stakes when it really doesn’t matter who wins;. The comic strip character Pogo wisely told us: We have met the enemy and he is us. The spymasters are incented by their own bureaucratic imperatives and the gamesmanship itself, not by righteousness or utility. His credo seems to be, rage against the machine, with futility.

Indeed, the title of the film stems from a most unsettling and revelatory image from the young le Carré’s trip with his father to Monaco – a grim analogy about the hopeless position of those who are pawns in the games of others.

What formed the cynical rage behind the cultured and ever so pleasant le Carré? As Morris probes le Carré’s childhood, we learn of his father, a sociopath and career con artist, a man so psychotically selfish that his mother abandoned her sons as the only way to escape their father.

Le Carré also explains the impact on him of the British traitor Kim Philby, the pivotal moment of his time in British espionage, which cemented Le Carrie’s own fascination with betrayal.

It is important for le Carré to take the measure of Morris as interviewer/interrogator. It is so interesting that le Carré/Cromwell’s storytelling (the means? the depth? the very content?) depends on whom he is engaged with.

Erroll Morris has created some of the best ever American documentary films, including Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line. He is the master of the interview doc, where he uses a gizmo to photograph his subjects while they maintain direct eye contact with him; he has employed the technique to let Robert McNamara (The Fog of War) and Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known) reveal more of themselves than they intended and to introduce us to the woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary as a sex slave and later cloned her pet dogs (Tabloid) and the designer of execution techniques who denied the Holocaust (Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter, Jr.).

Many le Carré novels and stories have been made into excellent films, which are available to stream, including

My favorite is the 1979 Alec Guinness version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which is not currently available to stream, but you can find the DVD.

The Pigeon Tunnel is streaming on, AppleTV.

MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY: Errol Morris and the unreliable narrator

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Timothy Leary and Joanna Harcourt-Smith in MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY

The documentarian Errol Morris has a remarkable gift for finding interview subjects with bizarre stories to tell. In My Psychedelic Love Story, Morris introduces us to Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who was swept off her feet in 1972 by bad boy celebrity Timothy Leary and spent a few years as his romantic partner. This was a period when Leary, hounded by US authorities for advocating psychedelic drug use, was on the lam in Europe and the Middle East, and finally imprisoned.

Joanna Harcourt-Smith in MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY

Morris extracts the tale from Harcourt-Smith herself. We learned that Harcourt-Smith came from a wealthy but difficult and unconventional upbringing. She plunged into a hippie version of what we would now call a Eurotrash lifestyle.

While much of her story is undeniably factual, we suspect that Harcourt-Smith is less than a reliable narrator. She drops bits like “I was happy we were stopping in Lebanon because the President was in love with my mother”. It’s either an astonishing fact or a an astonishingly brazen lie. Either way, she’s entertaining.

I’ve loved Morris since his first feature in 1978, Gates of Heaven, the story of a Bay Area pet cemetery and its quirky owners and customers (plus digging up all the dead pets and moving them from Cupertino to Napa). For bizarre personal stories, it’s tough to top Morris’ Tabloid, about a woman who kidnapped and sexually abused a Mormon missionary in England and retired in North Carolina to a pastime of tending dogs cloned in Korea,

My Psychedelic Love Story, which is minor Morris, is streaming on Showtime.

DVD/Stream of the Week: The Unknown Known

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Rumsfeld: unruffled by the Errol Morris documentary treatmentErrol Morris is a master documentarian (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Standard Operating Procedure), so he is the perfect guy to explore the personality and career – and, above all, the self-certainty – of Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For most of the film, Rumsfeld himself is on-screen talking to Morris’ camera. Rumsfeld is apparently completely immune from self-doubt, but ultimately reveals more about himself than he would like.

The title of the picture comes from a Rumsfeld memo that describes a policy maker’s “unknown known” as that which you thought you know but it turns out that you didn’t. Of course, the classic “unknown known” is the certainty that the Iraq War would be justified and would turn out well.

In contrast, the “unknown unknown” is something that you don’t know that you don’t know and that Rumsfeld says that you have to imagine (such as the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks). Of course, the imagining of all kinds of such attacks drives the neo-conservative theory of preemptive war – to strike at those who can be IMAGINED to threaten you.

Rumsfeld is remarkably glib and very effective at selling his own version of reality. Morris takes this on early in the documentary by getting Rumsfeld to deny linking Saddam with Al Qaeda and then shows him doing exactly that in a pre-Iraq War news conference. Indeed, Morris himself is an effective off-screen participant throughout, sparring with Rumsfeld, with each guy winning his share of verbal tussles.

When Rumsfeld thinks that he’s won a point, he grins the infuriating grin in the image above. The one time he loses his smile is when Morris mentions a moment when Rumsfeld almost became Reagan’s Vice-President (and then future President), and Rumsfeld acknowledges that, yes, this was possible. The film is brilliantly edited, and Morris knows EXACTLY how long to extend a shot to catch Rumsfeld in moments of reflection.

The movie traces Rumsfeld’s remarkable life and career from his marriage and early start as a young Congressman thru his roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations with the end of Watergate, the fall of Saigon, his salesmanship for defense spending increases in the 1970s and his service as Reagan’s Middle East envoy. After a time in the wilderness during Bush I, of course, he came to his greatest power during Bush II. He gives a stirring first-person account of the 9/11 attack of the Pentagon, relating what the scene was like even before the first responders arrived. But the core of the film is about the Rumsfeld decisions about Iraq.

Unusual for a current events documentary, there’s also some top shelf music from Danny Elfman, Oscar nominated for Good Will Hunting and Milk.

You can find The Unknown Known on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

The Unknown Known: Rumsfeld exposed…by himself

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Rumsfeld: unruffled by the Errol Morris documentary treatmentErrol Morris is a master documentarian (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Standard Operating Procedure), so he is the perfect guy to explore the personality and career – and, above all, the self-certainty – of Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  For most of the film, Rumsfeld himself is on-screen talking to Morris’ camera.  Rumsfeld is apparently completely immune from self-doubt, but ultimately reveals more about himself than he would like.

The title of the picture comes from a Rumsfeld memo that describes a policy maker’s “unknown known” as that which you thought you know but it turns out that you didn’t.  Of course, the classic “unknown known” is the certainty that the Iraq War would be justified and would turn out well.

In contrast, the “unknown unknown” is something that you don’t know that you don’t know and that Rumsfeld says that you have to imagine (such as the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks).  Of course, the imagining of all kinds of such attacks drives the neo-conservative theory of preemptive war – to strike at those who can be IMAGINED to threaten you.

Rumsfeld is remarkably glib and very effective at selling his own version of reality.  Morris takes this on early in the documentary by getting Rumsfeld to deny linking Saddam with Al Qaeda and then shows him doing exactly that in a pre-Iraq War news conference.  Indeed, Morris himself is an effective off-screen participant throughout, sparring with Rumsfeld, with each guy winning his share of verbal tussles.

When Rumsfeld thinks that he’s won a point, he grins the infuriating grin in the image above.  The one time he loses his smile is when Morris mentions a moment when Rumsfeld almost became Reagan’s Vice-President (and then future President), and Rumsfeld acknowledges that, yes, this was possible.  The film is brilliantly edited, and Morris knows EXACTLY how long to extend a shot to catch Rumsfeld in moments of reflection.

The movie traces Rumsfeld’s remarkable life and career from his marriage and early start as a young Congressman  thru his roles in the Nixon and Ford administrations with the end of Watergate, the fall of Saigon, his salesmanship for defense spending increases in the 1970s and his service as Reagan’s Middle East envoy.  After a time in the wilderness during Bush I, of course, he came to his greatest power during Bush II.  He gives a stirring first-person account of the 9/11 attack of the Pentagon, relating what the scene was like even before the first responders arrived.  But the core of the film is about the Rumsfeld decisions about Iraq.

Unusual for a current events documentary, there’s also some top shelf music from Danny Elfman, Oscar nominated for Good Will Hunting and Milk.

You can find The Unknown Known tomorrow in theaters and streaming now on Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video

DVD of the Week: Tabloid

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In Tabloid, master documentarian Errol Morris delivers the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave.  McKinney doesn’t like the film, but she has no complaint because two-thirds of the film is her telling her story in her own words.  The humor derives from her being such a clearly unreliable narrator – “barking mad” in the colorfully accurate description of a British journalist.  Morris came across her story decades after the kidnapping, when she had her dead dog Booger cloned from “Spirit Booger” into a litter of Korean-named Boogers.

Morris’ last two films (Standard Operating Procedure about the Abu Ghraib abuses and The Fog of War) were as funny as a heart attack.  But remember that Morris’ earliest films (Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida and Fast Cheap & Out of Control) also focused on eccentrics and were plenty funny.  Just for fun, this time Morris even leaves in some of his snarky wisecracks to the interviewees.

This is one of the funniest movies of the year and the funniest documentary since The Aristocrats.

Tabloid: a gut-bustingly funny documentary

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In Tabloid, master documentarian Errol Morris delivers the hilarious story of Joyce McKinney, a beauty queen jailed for manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave.  McKinney doesn’t like the film, but she has no complaint because two-thirds of the film is her telling her story in her own words.  The humor derives from her being such a clearly unreliable narrator – “barking mad” in the colorfully accurate description of a British journalist.  Morris came across her story decades after the kidnapping, when she had her dead dog Booger cloned from “Spirit Booger” into a litter of Korean-named Boogers.

Morris’ last two films (Standard Operating Procedure about the Abu Ghraib abuses and The Fog of War) were as funny as a heart attack.  But remember that Morris’ earliest films (Gates of Heaven, Vernon Florida and Fast Cheap & Out of Control) also focused on eccentrics and were plenty funny.  Just for fun, this time Morris even leaves in some of his snarky wisecracks to the interviewees.

This is one of the funniest movies of the year and the funniest documentary since The Aristocrats.

New Movies I'm Looking Forward To

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Edward Norton corrects Edward Norton in Leaves of Grass

I’ve just updated Movies I’m Looking Forward To.  We’ve got Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Howl, The Social Network and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger all coming out in the next two weeks.  Here are some new entries:

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Woody Allen’s latest comedy about romantic entanglements and human self-delusion. Stars Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Josh Brolin.  Releases October 1.

Tamara Drewe:  Steven Frears (The Queen, The Snapper, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity) brings us a sex comedy.  A writer’s colony in the English countryside is disrupted when a local woman returns with a nose job that has made her into an irresistible hottie.  She enjoys being irresistible.  Releases October 8.

Leaves of Grass:  A college professor is tricked into returning to Oklahoma by his pot-dealing identical twin brother.  Hilarity ensues.  Edward Norton plays both twins.  Strong supporting cast with Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss and Tim Blake Nelson.  Rolling out slowly across the country.

Tabloid: A reputedly very funny Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, Gates of Heaven)  documentary tracing the story of a woman who had her dead dog cloned; it turns out that, years before, she was accused of manacling a Mormon missionary as her sex slave.  Debuted at Telluride; wide release not yet scheduled.

For trailers, go to Movies I’m Looking Forward To.