The Tailor of Panama (112 mins, 15) Directed by John Boorman; starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Gleeson
After the critical and commercial failure of his single excursion outside of genre fiction, The Naive and Sentimental Lover, John le Carré returned by popular demand to espionage in 1974 with one of his finest works, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The title gave a deadly twist to a children's playground game and when, more than two decades later, he chose to make his hero a genuine clothier, he gave the novel a deceptively innocent title reminiscent of childhood and Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Panama.
One doubts if he was consciously thinking of Graham Greene's celebrated, semi-satirical essay on Potter's fiction in which he dismissed the eponymous hero of The Tailor of Gloucester as 'ineffective and too virtuous'. Without doubt, however, le Carré had Our Man in Havana in mind, as he says in his acknowledgements.
Like Greene's novel, The Tailor of Panama is about a British expatriate in an unstable Latin American country put under pressure by British intelligence and inventing, with lethal consequences, a non-existent spy ring and a fictitious political conspiracy. Le Carré's fine book is nearly twice the length of Greene's, denser and less funny, but the movie, of which he is co-scriptwriter with Andrew Davies and director John Boorman, is far superior to, and much tougher than, the film Greene made of Our Man in Havana with Carol Reed in 1960.
Le Carré's equivalents of Jim Wormold, the vacuum-cleaner salesman, and Hawthorne, the very establishment MI6 agent (the characters played by Alec Guinness and Noël Coward in Our Man in Havana) are Harry Pendel (so well played by Geoffrey Rush), the Panama City bespoke tailor, and Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan), the maverick MI6 operative who's been posted to the backwater of the Panama embassy as punishment for troublemaking.
Although the comic intrigue in Greene's novel anticipated both the success of Castro's revolution (which followed the book's publication by a few months) and, quite uncannily, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Wormold and Hawthorne are figures from farce. Pendel and Osnard have a much greater weight and are altogether, on first acquaintance, less genial.
Both men are frauds and self-deceivers, but their fraudulence and self-deception have a larger political dimension, as we appreciate during the witty courtship between tailor and spy with which the film opens. Pendel, the working-class Londoner who learnt his tailoring in jail, poses as an established Savile Row master and dispenses old- world class to the unscrupulous rich and nouveaux riches of Panama. The spirit of Benny, his late Jewish uncle (an amusing turn by Harold Pinter), hovers over his shoulder giving dubious advice, but Pendel really believes in the snobbish standards and outmoded Englishness that he has espoused.
Osnard, who has seen through Pendel's façade, works for an organisation that, in the post-imperial, post-Cold War world, has become largely redundant. He pretends that Britain has a major role in the world, if one dependent for intelligence operations on US subventions, but his growing cynicism has turned him into an opportunist. When he seduces Pendel - with money and blackmail - into becoming an agent, he wants to believe in 'the silent opposition' of local liberals that the tailor invents, and in a non-existent clandestine scheme to sell the Panama Canal to a Chinese, French and Japanese consortium.
The difference between the two is that Pendel is essentially a decent man, real concern underlying his subservience, while Osnard exists in a moral vacuum. The truly good person, however, is Pendel's American wife, Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis), a representative of the reality principle. She respects the recently appointed Panamanian executives of the canal company for which she works, and stands in sharp contrast to her half-demented fellow-countrymen plotting against them in the Pentagon.
The film is given a firm sense of reality through the confident handling of authentic locations by Boorman, who has worked in Latin America before in The Emerald Forest and, more recently, in a politically volatile state in Beyond Rangoon. There is no excessive use of local colour and the background is integrated into the dramatic action. Boorman directs with a light touch of a sort that was only to be seen intermittently in his work before his last movie, The General , about the Irish gangster, Martin Cahill. Brendan Gleeson, so superb as Cahill, here immerses himself in the role of a burnt-out ex-revolutionary who becomes Pendel's chief fall guy.
The cleverest trick, which adds to the humour and excitement, as well as underlining the film's meaning, is the casting of Pierce Brosnan, who's never been so good. When he is briefed at MI6's Thamesside HQ by a bland superior, his eyes twinkle evilly at the prospect of easy pickings in corrupt Panama, and we realise that this is a different organisation from that last bastion of patriotism served by James Bond. There have been supposed anti-Bonds on the screen before, but here we have the most confident embodiment of Bond since Connery's day serving himself rather than Her Majesty.
Osnard is suave in the manner of a student of Playboy ; his only piece of advanced technology is a Zippo containing a miniature camera; as a lover, he's violent, sweaty and not irresistible, and his word is not his bond. Just before Osnard arrives at the tailoring shop, Pendel is assuring a corpulent client that the suit he's fitting is the sort Mr Connery wears and that he has the same 'golfer's shoulders'.
