Here is a brief excerpt from Richard Brody’s review of Errol Morris’s documentary about  John le Carré. It appeared in The New Yorker, published in the October 24, 2023, issue. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Errol Morris’s portrait of John le Carré ignores its own strengths and leans into its weaknesses.

It’s appropriate that the new film by Errol Morris, perhaps the most theoretically minded of documentarians, should provide a keen reminder that most problems of substance are also problems of form. The documentary takes its title, “The Pigeon Tunnel,” from the 2016 memoir by David Cornwell, better known by his pen name, John le Carré, and it is composed almost entirely of interviews in which the supreme spy novelist talks to Morris about his life and the people in it. (Cornwell died in 2020; the interviews in this film were conducted in 2019.) From the start, Morris makes the film’s creation part of its subject. He opens with a clip in which Cornwell, turning the tables on Morris in a way that manifestly delights the filmmaker, asks, “Who are you?,” and explains why he wants to know. Being interviewed, he says, “is a performance art,” and he wants to know whom he’s “performing to,” because “you need to know something about the ambitions of the people you’re talking to.”

For Cornwell, the matter is of more than theoretical interest. Having been a military interrogator for British intelligence, he compares the interviews with Morris to his own efforts to coax answers from enemy subjects by way of “the relationship”—by “establishing their dependence on the interrogator.” Yet, despite Cornwell’s striving for reflexivity, for getting behind the onscreen talk to explore his relationship to Morris, nothing so dramatic takes place; the high-stakes mind games that he likes to think he’s playing never really occur. “The Pigeon Tunnel” (which is playing in theatres and streaming on Apple TV+) is nonetheless an absorbing, colorful self-portrait. I say “self” because, although Morris, as the filmmaker, doubtless made the many decisions that go into the composition of the portrait, the broad outlines are manifestly dictated by Cornwell as he talks onscreen. Morris intervenes both too little and too much, but the movie somehow still hits a sweet spot in the happy medium of those antipodal failings. All the same, it falls far short of its own theoretical perspectives, and, perhaps inadvertently, opens up others that it never directly addresses.

The main substance of the movie is Cornwell’s reminiscences of his father, Ronnie, a con man with big dreams and reckless schemes who struggled hectically to stay a step ahead of creditors and the law, and didn’t always succeed. He alternated between grandiose ways of life and desperate head-down flight (or worse). Cornwell’s mother, Olive, left when the boy was five, exhausted by Ronnie’s ways and exasperated by his infidelities, after which the déclassé aspirant to grandeur did his best to propel David into a class that he himself could never enter. Having succeeded, Cornwell’s father resented the social gap between them even as he strove to catch his son’s coattails. (Cornwell, writing as le Carré, discussed the relationship in a 2002 piece for The New Yorker, “In Ronnie’s Court.”) The subject that Morris pursues, and that Cornwell takes up with alacrity, is the connection between such an upbringing of romantic extremes—between the louche margins of high society and the actual underworld—and Cornwell’s career as, first, a spy, and then a spy novelist. “Betrayal fascinates me,” Morris declares, in voice-over, and he presses Cornwell to connect Ronnie’s fantasies and fabrications, lies and schemes and deceptions, with the lies and deceptions of espionage.

Unsurprisingly, Cornwell delivers a startling, gripping array of tales and observations, full of memorable and vivid descriptions. He recalls being sent, as a boy, to a racetrack—the bookies had barred his heavily indebted father on pain of violence—with a suitcase full of cash to be distributed among creditors and coming back with a suitcase full of fresh winnings. He describes his activities as a spy while still at Oxford, where the target was one of his best friends. He discusses Kim Philby, a British intelligence chief who, in 1963, was revealed to be a double agent for the Soviet Union, and declares that Philby is central to his self-conception as a spy and as a novelist. He talks of his experience of Berlin in the days after the Wall was erected. And he traces, poignantly and painfully, the reappearances of his father after the le Carré books had brought fame and wealth.

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Hderer is a direct link to the complete article.