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.”)
