"The Tailor of Panama" is an adaption of a good John le Carre novel, which is in turn an adaption of a better novel by Graham Greene. There's nothing wrong with lifting the plot of "Our Man In Havana," especially since le Carre acknowledged this at the outset and managed to do some interesting things with his story. "Tailor" is a fine rumination on the costs of political and personal deception, more downbeat than it needs to be, but le Carre isn't in the business of writing happy books, and he manages to create a pair of interesting characters, in the way-over-his-head title character, one Harry Pendel, and his more opportunistic partner-in-crime, the corrupt and corrupting British agent Andy Osnard.
The movie manages to do right by one of these characters, anyway. Pierce Brosnan is inspired casting as Osnard, a clever rake with a heart of lead. As transparent as all that is, it's hard not to like him and admire his randy gusto. Brosnan gets off some funny lines, mostly as he's getting ready to hop into bed with one of his female co-stars. Like Olivier's Richard III, you dislike him, but you can't help but be entertained and wish him better than he deserves.
I can't get behind Rush's performance, though. Part of it is the trouble of playing a character whose greatest interest in the book comes from his internal torments. Director John Boorman helps out by having Pendel be visited by the image of his dead Uncle Benny as the plot thickens, and these surreal scenes do work when they happen. But Rush seems to have based his characterization on Alec Guinness's Fagin from "Oliver Twist," and he doesn't quite have the screen presence to carry off his more over-the-top scenes. As Harvey Kornman from Blazing Saddles" might have put it, "too Jewish."
The movie does a good job of conjuring the vital, sleazy ambiance of the book's Panama City, and what Matthew Wilder in an earlier review here said so well, "the melancholy of ordinary human characters caught in the cogs of wheels too large for their imagining" which has been le Carre's M.O. since "A Small Town In Germany." The scenes in the British embassy come across particularly well, though without some of the complexities and character insights that made the same scenes more involving in the novel.
What I missed most in the movie was the sense of Pendel's bad intelligence taking on a life of its own. Here we just get the feeling right away that he is spinning some threadbare fiction no one would rightly believe if they weren't seduced by the smell of money. It doesn't help that the characters of Mickie Abraxas and Marta, Pendel's allies in the novel, are not sufficiently developed in the movie. Brendan Gleeson actually outhams Rush in the former role, while Leonor Varela is wasted in a handful of scenes and never given her proper place in the story's spotlight.
What else was wrong? Too much exposition, especially at the outset. We already know everything about Pendel's and Osnard's dicey backgrounds before the titles are over, and the novel's best scene, a cold opening of the pair meeting for the first time at Pendel's shop, is stripped of its juice because there's no reason for us to wonder why the conversation is taking the turns it does.
One improvement over the book was the ending, not as downbeat and catastrophic on film as it was on page. Seeing Osnard winging away scot-free and unbowed was nice, but the overall impact of the conclusion still leaves one cold. Does the punishment meted out to Pendel really fit his crime?
I liked this film on the whole, just not very much. I can easily understand the attraction of the story, and hope it finds the thoughtful audience it deserves. It just could have been better. How much better? Watch Sir Alec in the movie version of "Our Man In Havana" and find out. And the next time Hollywood wants to make a Graham Greene movie about flawed heroes in Latin locales, they should take a good look at still-cinematically-virgin "The Power And The Glory." Now that would make a good movie.
The movie manages to do right by one of these characters, anyway. Pierce Brosnan is inspired casting as Osnard, a clever rake with a heart of lead. As transparent as all that is, it's hard not to like him and admire his randy gusto. Brosnan gets off some funny lines, mostly as he's getting ready to hop into bed with one of his female co-stars. Like Olivier's Richard III, you dislike him, but you can't help but be entertained and wish him better than he deserves.
I can't get behind Rush's performance, though. Part of it is the trouble of playing a character whose greatest interest in the book comes from his internal torments. Director John Boorman helps out by having Pendel be visited by the image of his dead Uncle Benny as the plot thickens, and these surreal scenes do work when they happen. But Rush seems to have based his characterization on Alec Guinness's Fagin from "Oliver Twist," and he doesn't quite have the screen presence to carry off his more over-the-top scenes. As Harvey Kornman from Blazing Saddles" might have put it, "too Jewish."
The movie does a good job of conjuring the vital, sleazy ambiance of the book's Panama City, and what Matthew Wilder in an earlier review here said so well, "the melancholy of ordinary human characters caught in the cogs of wheels too large for their imagining" which has been le Carre's M.O. since "A Small Town In Germany." The scenes in the British embassy come across particularly well, though without some of the complexities and character insights that made the same scenes more involving in the novel.
What I missed most in the movie was the sense of Pendel's bad intelligence taking on a life of its own. Here we just get the feeling right away that he is spinning some threadbare fiction no one would rightly believe if they weren't seduced by the smell of money. It doesn't help that the characters of Mickie Abraxas and Marta, Pendel's allies in the novel, are not sufficiently developed in the movie. Brendan Gleeson actually outhams Rush in the former role, while Leonor Varela is wasted in a handful of scenes and never given her proper place in the story's spotlight.
What else was wrong? Too much exposition, especially at the outset. We already know everything about Pendel's and Osnard's dicey backgrounds before the titles are over, and the novel's best scene, a cold opening of the pair meeting for the first time at Pendel's shop, is stripped of its juice because there's no reason for us to wonder why the conversation is taking the turns it does.
One improvement over the book was the ending, not as downbeat and catastrophic on film as it was on page. Seeing Osnard winging away scot-free and unbowed was nice, but the overall impact of the conclusion still leaves one cold. Does the punishment meted out to Pendel really fit his crime?
I liked this film on the whole, just not very much. I can easily understand the attraction of the story, and hope it finds the thoughtful audience it deserves. It just could have been better. How much better? Watch Sir Alec in the movie version of "Our Man In Havana" and find out. And the next time Hollywood wants to make a Graham Greene movie about flawed heroes in Latin locales, they should take a good look at still-cinematically-virgin "The Power And The Glory." Now that would make a good movie.