Much has been written about how hard it is for screenwriters to find suitable villains for spy movies and other thrillers now that Communists and Nazis are no more and ethnic sensitivity has made other forms of scapegoating unfashionable. But if current movies are any indication, a spy’s greatest threat comes from his own organization.
John le Carré foresaw this trend even before the end of the Cold War, in numerous spy novels that made “mole” a household word. Mission: Impossible and its sequel have the hero fighting renegade agents from his own spy network. The current debacle surrounding alleged FBI mole Robert Hanssen shows what a hard time spy fiction has outrunning reality. Even this month’s comic takes on the genre, Spy Kids and Company Man, suggest that intelligence agencies are their own worst enemies. After all, how good can the secret agents in Spy Kids be if they have to be rescued by their own children? And in Company Man, the incompetence of field agents is matched by their superiors’ willingness to compromise any ideals in order to avoid bad publicity.
So it’s apt that we now have a film adaptation of le Carré’s recent novel The Tailor of Panama. Just so you’ll get the point of what a sorry state the spy business is in these days, the story’s chief spy — a sleazy, self-serving slacker named Andrew Osnard — is played by Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan takes unholy glee in defacing his charming, slick James Bond image. (His Bond too fought a rogue agent in Goldeneye.) After one screw-up too many, the British spy is sent to Panama to keep an eye on the Canal at a time of uncertainty over its future ownership. Osnard decides to gain entry to Panama’s oligarchs through their pants — that is, via Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), British expatriate and tailor to the local aristocracy.
Pendel is a fascinating fellow, especially in Rush’s nimble hands. Behind his Savile Row image is a shady past, which Osnard exploits in order to extort Pendel’s help. Although Pendel’s wife, Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis, atypically spiritless), works with some of the financiers who are deciding the Canal’s future, he actually has little insight into current politics. But he does know a couple of former opposition leaders from the Noriega days: his own shop assistant, a disfigured beauty named Marta (Leonor Varela), and a broken-down drunk named Mickie Abraxas (Brendan Gleeson). To appease Osnard, Pendel spins a yarn that Abraxas is leading a new underground movement. Pendel is a tragicomic variation on the weaselly theatrical producer Rush played in Shakespeare in Love; as he lies and improvises his way from one jam into another, you almost expect him to sigh, “It’s a mystery.”
Osnard seems to know Pendel is lying, but he also knows the story is good enough to persuade his superiors to funnel millions of pounds to the supposed resistance — via Osnard’s pocket, of course. Before long, the Americans get involved. The CIA and the Army are as willing as everyone else to buy this fiction because it justifies their spending of massive amounts of money; the fate of the Canal is certainly a convenient pretext to petition Congress for a budget increase.
Director John Boorman and le Carré (who wrote the screenplay, along with Andrew Davies) manage not to lose sight of the individual figures amid the geopolitical intrigue. Particularly poignant is Gleeson, the star of Boorman’s The General, as a man whose spirit has been beaten out of him primarily by government thugs, and who has finished the job himself. But the cool, dispassionate air they bring to the project probably works better on the page than on screen. The result is a curiously flat and unthrilling thriller. Toward the end of the film, Boorman tosses in a few explosions and a laughably slow car chase, but his heart is less in creating the kind of action spectacle he’s capable of (Deliverance, Excalibur) than in dressing a cerebral political black comedy in the ill-fitting costume of a genre movie.
