One Sharp-Cut Suit Of A Movie

Hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered soldiers flopping helplessly on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. Code words, drugs and secret stashes of cash dubiously connecting Iranian nationals and Colombian "freedom fighters." Ski-masked burglars caught in the beams of police flashlights at the Watergate Hotel.

Hidden political agendas, bad guesses, fragmentary truth and outright mendacity sometimes cause the spy world to hit the real world with a resounding splat. It's always dismal when it happens and, to a cruel enough mindset, funny — bleakly, caustically comic.

You wonder, who thought this was a good idea? Why did they think this was a good idea? You can't ever believe that these things happen, but they do, they do.

The just-released film of John Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama shows why. It's a very fine and altogether rare movie — a satire too realistic to play for belly laughs and too giddily self-aware and subversive to make a routine spy thriller. It also benefits mightily from some very sharp un-Bondian work by Pierce Brosnan and the presence of Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush.

Brosnan plays Andy Osnard, a British intelligence agent whose ardent boozing, gambling and womanizing forces his boss to banish him to Panama, which, with its only 200 or so British residents, is an MI6 graveyard.

But that makes Harry Pendel (Rush) easier to find. A tailor who, like his shop, falsely claims lineage back on London's Savile Row, Pendel resembles a lot of people in Panama — a step ahead of a blighted past or the law. Deep in debt, he's a convicted arsonist who fled England at the behest of his now-ghostly Uncle Bennie (playwright and author Harold Pinter) when he served his time in Old Bailey.

He's a perfect mark for Osnard, who wants dirt on Panama, particularly on the Panama Canal, which the Americans (a usual source of evil in Le Carre's work) want to take back from the Panamanians. Pendel gives Osnard what he wants and, ever the obliging tailor, even dresses it up a little. Namely, he lies a lot, spinning a story about the "Silent Opposition," old anti-Noriega Panamanians plotting to topple Panama's government and seize the canal, using some of his friends as leading characters in his grim little tale.

Unbelieving but maneuvering for a big payday, Osnard feeds the information to the British and Americans, who are only too willing to act on any excuse to take back the canal.

Spying, as co-screenwriter Le Carre has observed, is a squalid business, and it's a credit to director and co-writer John Boorman that so much of Panama's seediness fits on-screen. It's a world of big-time drug dealers, corrupt bankers and bought politicos. Known for serious movies like Deliverance and Hope and Glory, Boorman gives the movie a sweaty, gleeful, sexual edge and pays proper homage to sources like The Man in the White Suit and Our Man in Havana.

Another surprise is Brosnan. Lke the other great Bond of our time, Sean Connery, Brosnan plays 007 with an idealism and charming veneer that barely conceals a ruthless violence and amorality. Brosnan plays Osnard as a Bond turned inside out, bankrupt of idealism and discipline, all libido and unerring instinct for vulnerability. It's a ferocious performance that shows just how far from 007 Brosnan can go.

Rush makes Pendel a jittery collection of contradictions. Credit him for stitching into the character so many threads of weakness, decency, love, courage, mendacity, sweet naivete and sad cynicism without once rending him. Pendel is essentially an innocent, a dreamer whose lies guarantee survival and express an outrage at how everything (himself included) is so shabby without them. He builds people into what he wants them to be.

And in a way, so does The Tailor of Panama; by movie's end, Pendel should pay fully for his sins, but Boorman and Le Carre give him a soft landing. It doesn't quite fit, but the rest of the film is so crafty and enjoyable that you don't mind. You won't believe that they got away with it, but they did, they did.

By NICK SAMBIDES Jr.
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