John LeCarre

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.

DVD/Stream of the Week: A MOST WANTED MAN – a last look at Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliance

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Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A MOST WANTED MAN
Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A MOST WANTED MAN

Espionage thrillers adapted from John le Carré novels, like A Most Wanted Man, are so good because le Carré, himself a former British intelligence operative, understand that intelligence services, riddled with bureaucratic jealousies and careerist rivalries, are not monoliths. His very human spies spend as much energy fighting each other as they do fighting the enemy. As a result, le Carré’s stories are more complex and character-driven than a standard “good-guys-hunt-down-a-terrorist” thriller plot.

That’s also the case with A Most Wanted Man, with which le Carré moves from the Cold War to the War of Terror. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Günther, the leader of a German anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg. He must track down a possible Chechen terrorist while parrying off other German security forces, the CIA (Robin Wright), a shady banker (Willem Dafoe) and a do-gooder human rights attorney (Rachel McAdams). It’s the classic le Carré three-dimensional-chess-against-the-clock, and it works as an engrossing thriller.

But the A Most Wanted Man’s biggest asset is a searing performance by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Günther is a canny and determined guy who needs to outsmart everyone else and manipulate forces beyond his control – and Hoffman nails it. His final scene is a spectacular explosion of emotion. (So soon after Hoffman’s death, it’s impossible to watch him here, with a huge belly and with his character chain-smoking and swilling whiskey, and not think of his final relapse into his ultimately fatal addiction; for this reason, A Most Wanted Man may be even more effective after a few years have passed.)

That being said, Robin Wright’s role as a duplicitous, shark-like CIA officer is under-written and doesn’t let her show her acting chops like House of Cards. Dafoe and McAdams are good in their roles. I was distracted by Grigoriy Dobrygin’s performance as the Chechen, which looked like bad Jeremy Davies without the twitches. The fine German actress Nina Hoss (Barbara) plays Hoffman’s assistant, and I hope we start to see her in more English language roles.

But the bottom line is that A Most Wanted Man is, overall, a satisfying thriller, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance is reason enough to watch it. (BTW le Carré’s screen masterpiece is the 1979 series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is available on DVD from Netflix.)  A Most Wanted Man is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.

A MOST WANTED MAN: a last look at Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brilliance

by

Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A MOST WANTED MAN
Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A MOST WANTED MAN

Espionage thrillers adapted from John le Carré novels, like A Most Wanted Man, are so good because le Carré, himself a former British intelligence operative, understand that intelligence services, riddled with bureaucratic jealousies and careerist rivalries, are not monoliths.  His very human spies spend as much energy fighting each other as they do fighting the enemy.  As a result, le Carré’s stories are more complex and character-driven than a standard “good-guys-hunt-down-a-terrorist” thriller plot.

That’s also the case with A Most Wanted Man, with which le Carré moves from the Cold War to the War of Terror.  Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Günther, the leader of a German anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg.  He must track down a possible Chechen terrorist while parrying off other German security forces, the CIA (Robin Wright), a shady banker (Willem Dafoe) and a do-gooder human rights attorney (Rachel McAdams).  It’s the classic le Carré three-dimensional-chess-against-the-clock, and it works as an engrossing thriller.

But the A Most Wanted Man’s biggest asset is a searing performance by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Günther is a canny and determined guy who needs to outsmart everyone else and manipulate forces beyond his control – and Hoffman nails it.  His final scene is a spectacular explosion of emotion.  (So soon after Hoffman’s death, it’s impossible to watch him here, with a huge belly and with his character chain-smoking and swilling whiskey, and not think of his final relapse into his ultimately fatal addiction; for this reason, A Most Wanted Man may be even more effective after a few years have passed.)

That being said, Robin Wright’s role as a duplicitous, shark-like CIA officer is under-written and doesn’t let her show her acting chops like House of Cards.  Dafoe and McAdams are good in their roles.  I was distracted by Grigoriy Dobrygin’s performance as the Chechen, which looked like bad Jeremy Davies without the twitches.  The fine German actress Nina Hoss (Barbara) plays Hoffman’s assistant, and I hope we start to see her in more English language roles.

But the bottom line is that A Most Wanted Man is, overall, a satisfying thriller, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance is reason enough to catch it in the theaters.  (BTW le Carré’s screen masterpiece is the 1979 series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is available on DVD from Netflix.)

DVD of the Week: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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In this 1979 miniseries version of the classic John le Carre spy novel, there is a Soviet mole in the highest echelon of British intelligence.  It could be anyone except George Smiley, whom the other top spies have pushed out to pasture.  Smiley, in one of Alec Guinness’ greatest performances, begins a deliberate hunt to unmask the double agent.  Guinness is joined by a superb cast that includes Ian Richardson, Patrick Stewart, Ian Bannen and Sian Phillips.  It’s 290 minutes of pressure-packed whodunit.

The Labor Day weekend is a great opportunity to watch the old master spy drilling down through the characters of his former peers to expose the mole – one of the best mysteries ever on film.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has been remade into a much shorter theatrical version that will open in the US on November 18.  This new film version will also feature a top tier cast – Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Fassbender, Ciaran Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones and Stephen Rea.   The trailer is at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Other recent DVD picks have been Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.