It’s difficult to imagine anybody more intelligent and erudite than author John Le Carré, whose interviews over the years — since his breakout success with 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — were as fascinating, thoughtful and densely packed as his subsequent novels.
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| John Le Carré is relaxed, candid and philosophical when discussing his life and writing career, and how both were shaped by two key individuals during his childhood and early espionage service. |
Morris’ style is unconventional, to say the least. This film is less a documentary and more a feature-length interview, with Morris’ off-camera questions and commentary guiding and prodding Le Carré into a recitation of his life … but only those portions that concern how David John Moore Cornwell — his birth name — morphed into best-selling author John Le Carré.
This is emphasized during the film’s opening moments, where it becomes clear that Morris and Le Carré have agreed to venture solely into specific areas of the latter’s life. Within that limitation, the author is remarkably candid … but he strays no further.
Morris intercuts Le Carré’s facetime — seated comfortably behind a desk — with vintage photographs and newsreel footage, clips from big-screen and television adaptations of the author’s novels, and dramatized re-creations of key moments in his younger life. (The latter are this film’s least successful elements.)
Unfortunately, Morris’ outré style frequently distracts. Le Carré often is pictured in only one section of a screen “shattered” into multiple frames, the others containing bizarre images that flicker in and out of focus. Although it could be argued that this symbolizes the minute-by-minute ambiguity and paranoia of a career spy — which Cornwell was, as an MI5 officer from 1958 to ’64 — it further slows the film’s already unhurried pacing.
The title’s significance is twofold. On an obvious note, it’s both the title of Le Carré’s 2016 autobiographical work, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life; and also the “working title” with which he started almost every novel.
On a metaphorical level, it references an incident from David’s childhood, when his father took him on a business trip to France, where they stayed in a hotel that offered guests a rather unusual sport. Pigeons were bred on the hotel roof, and — at a specified time — shoved into a long dark tunnel. The birds would fly toward the lighted exit at the far end, emerging into the sky directly in front of gun-toting (and presumably well-liquored) male guests who’d blow them into bloodied feathers.
(One cannot help being sickened by this revolting “sport.”)
The symbolic element references how agents and double agents often are shoved by handlers into a course of action they believe to be justified and/or honorable, only to reach a particular destination where they’re betrayed and (often) executed.
Nobody ever accused Le Carré’s work of being frivolous, which is precisely the point; his grim, often tawdry, frequently gloomy (and therefore much more compelling) sagas were the antithesis — particularly in the 1960s and ’70s — of the larkish James Bond films and their many imitators. (To further drive that point home, we get a fleeting clip of Sean Connery, from Dr. No.)
We quickly learn the degree to which David’s adult life was molded by an impressively awful childhood. His father Ronnie was a career con artist and all-around shady individual who associated with even worse elements — such as the notorious Kray twins — and kept his family in constant debt. David’s mother Olive abandoned them when the boy was 5 years old, unable to handle the insecurity any longer.
Life with Ronnie and a subsequent series of “substitute mothers” was fraught with uncertainty; being dumped into the traditionally severe English public school system wasn’t much of an improvement.
(Rick Pym, the scheming father of the protagonist in Le Carré’s 1986 novel, A Perfect Spy, was based on Ronnie. It’s an exceptionally unflattering portrait.)
Nor did adulthood save David from his father. Ronnie (played, in dramatized footage, by Garry Cooper) continues to be an obnoxious presence, most disgracefully when — in this film’s most jaw-dropping revelation — he submits a bill for “parenting services rendered,” once he knows that his now-famous author son can afford it.
Ronnie’s continued influence — blatant and latent — is matched only by British traitor Kim Philby’s equally strong impact; indeed, Philby (played in dramatized footage by Simon Harrison) is the double-agent who blew David’s cover to the KGB, thus ending his career as an intelligence officer. (No surprise: Philby becomes “Gerald,” the mole hunted by the eternally put-upon George Smiley, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.)
Morris and Le Carré devote considerable time to the foolish idiocy of those running MI5 and MI6 during the 1950s and ‘60s, who naïvely believed that upper-class peers, having gone to “all the right schools,” therefore were — thanks to good breeding — inherently honest, honorable and trustworthy gentlemen. This (no surprise!) led to a series of increasingly embarrassing scandals involving Philby and other eventually exposed high-profile moles such as Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross.
This, in turn, fueled the sophistication, angst and moral ambiguity that typifies Le Carré’s espionage fiction. Morris’ film works best when it focuses on how that came about, as the author candidly acknowledges the degree to which his life, personality and writing were influenced heavily by Ronnie, and by Philby and the aristocratic twits who overlooked him and his ilk.
But viewers who prefer a background element to the rise and evolution of Le Carré’s career will be frustrated. Morris presents snapshots — David’s childhood, young adulthood, transformation into Le Carré — without offering context. (This review gives more specific information about David’s MI5 career than any portion of Morris’ film.)
And while Le Carré certainly is justifiably pleased with his literary career, and discusses it with insight and occasionally mordant wit, it would have been nice to know how he felt when Philby’s exposure suddenly forced him to become a full-time author. (But not precipitously. Spy Who Came In was preceded by two similarly pseudonymous novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality.
(Neither of which is mentioned in this film.)
Every filmmaker is entitled to an agenda, and that’s particularly true of documentarians. But I remained dissatisfied when The Pigeon Tunnel concluded. Too much context and detail are left out, much of it far from trivial.
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