‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ review: Tinker, tailor, filmmaker, spy
“Betrayal fascinates me,” says David Cornwell, better known as the prolific British spy novelist who wrote under the name John le Carré. Ironically, it is filmmaker Errol Morris who betrays his own probing instincts in his documentary about Cornwell’s life, “The Pigeon Tunnel.”
The Oscar-winning director of “The Fog of War,” Morris has rightfully earned a reputation as a seasoned and canny interviewer. You would never describe him as guileless. And yet it’s almost as if he’s allowed himself to be seduced by Cornwell. Despite it all, the end result is an often funny and endlessly watchable film — a master storyteller’s final bow — despite its flaws.
Early in their back-and-forth, Cornwell suggests that an interview is maybe just another word for interrogation. And yet he is never set back on his heels by Morris or lost in uncomfortable contemplation, but always in control. Is that because he knows his legacy is assured? (The film’s interviews were conducted in 2020, a year before his death at 89.) Or is it because Morris takes a deferential approach to their conversations? It’s an act of performance art to sit in front of a camera and talk about one’s life. Cornwell says as much. He is nothing if not self-aware — and he will only go so far. Morris employs all kinds of interesting visuals, including an expensive-looking room that is empty except for eggshells covering the entire floor. There’s no overt explanation for that image, but it implies a certain amount of cautiousness, even if Morris didn’t intend for it to represent his own feelings.
How much of this matters? Very little! Cornwell has great, exuberant eyebrows and he is a first-rate raconteur, parsing through his memories and hindsight realizations. He offers morsels of vulnerability, while carefully avoiding anything that cuts too close to the bone. Like too many celebrity documentaries, it is an exercise in image management. It just happens to be done with more wit and style than most.
Morris includes an old television interview that may give us some clues about this side of Cornwell’s self-mythologizing. A writer is an illusionist, he says. “And if people are constantly trying to look up his sleeve, then he’s going to spoil his trick.” Cornwell is intent on not spoiling his trick, even to the end. Morris doesn’t seem curious enough to wonder what that even means.
On the other hand, Cornwell has plenty to say about his father, Reggie, who was a philanderer and confidence trickster. “Life was a stage where pretense was everything. Being offstage was boring. And risk was attractive. But above all, what was attractive was the imprint of personality. Of truth, we didn’t speak. Of conviction, we didn’t speak.”
So you felt like a dupe, Morris asks?
“No, I joined. You polished your act, learned to tell funny stories, show off. You discover early there is no center to a human being. I wasn’t a dupe, I was invited to dupe other people.”
His mother abandoned them when he was 5, and his childhood was a destabilizing if colorful experience. A teenage trip accompanying his father to a Monte Carlo casino would give him the title of his memoir and this film. Pigeons were bred on-site and then sent through a tunnel, where they emerged into the sky — only to be shot out of the air for sport. The ones that survived would fly back, unaware they would be repeating the cycle the next day.
Morris thinks of this as a Sisyphean metaphor about life, but it also works as another way to think about betrayal, and the way we can be trapped by systems we don’t even understand. Capturing that was always one of Cornwell’s strengths as a writer. And he had such a clear understanding of the way privilege can warp a person’s behavior.
But that upbringing — of being one thing (a con man’s son) and trying to outwardly adopt the customs of another (he was educated at the poshest schools) — perhaps made him ideal pickings for espionage work. He washed out as a spy fairly quickly, by his own choice, and instead used those experiences to write about, and critique really, Britain’s intelligence services during the Cold War in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” among others.
He glosses over just how he launched his writing career (did he submit manuscripts all over town or did he have the right connections?) and you never get the sense that he had doubts — about what he was writing or whether he could succeed long term.
Also missing is anything about his two marriages or his children. It’s telling that with all his deeply thought-out ideas about who Reggie was as a parent, Cornwell has nothing to say about what fatherhood meant to him once his sons came into the world.
Late in the film, Morris tells him: “I keep hearing again and again and again that I have not pressed you hard enough about betrayal.”
Who is Morris referring to? My guess is he means the movie’s producers: Cornwell’s two sons, Simon and Stephen.
“I feel that you got the last drop out of the sponge on that subject,” Cornwell replies. “But I’ll answer any question you wish me to answer as truthfully as I can.”
Morris: “Do they want you to break down and sob?”
But then Cornwell brings up a topic that has gone previously unmentioned: “I’m not going to talk about my sex life, any more than I trust you would. It seems to be an intensely private matter. My love life has been a very difficult passage, as you would imagine, but it’s resolved itself wonderfully and that’s enough on that subject.”
Here’s what he’s not saying. There were infidelities. Many, many infidelities. According to Cornwell’s biographer Adam Sisman, the cheating served as “an ersatz form of spycraft, the excitement of adultery and the risk of exposure a substitute for real operations in the field, as it were. They required considerable tradecraft, with codes, dead letter boxes, and safe houses where he would go and supposedly write undisturbed, in reality places where he could take women without fear of discovery.”
“The Pigeon Tunnel” streams on Apple TV+ (its Oct. 20 release comes a day after what would have been Cornwell’s 92nd birthday) which is fitting, as the streamer is also home to “Slow Horses,” the espionage series that is an obvious nod to le Carré's novels.
Maybe the best reason to watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” though, is that it is a reminder of what documentaries can be when they’re made by a real filmmaker with sophisticated and cinematic ambitions.
Audiences have been inundated with slapdash, paint-by-numbers nonfiction streaming efforts that are relatively fast and inexpensive to make, a Wikipedia page brought to life featuring the inevitable drone shots throughout. Morris has more of an artist’s eye, using mirrors to create a fractured image that oh-so-slightly leaves you wondering what you’re looking at, exactly. That feels right. There are also “dramatized vignettes,” with actors recreating different moments from Cornwell’s memories, and they play like clips from an expensive, high-end Masterpiece series about his life.
“God was a big pal of his,” he says of his father, a smile playing around his lips. “Whether he believed in God is mysterious, but he was certain God believed in him.” What an incisive observation. Of course he became a writer.
To be a cunning storyteller on the page is one thing. Not as many authors are such winning company on screen. Cornwell offers up this last performance to Morris — and, by extension, to us — as the gift that it is.
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'THE PIGEON TUNNEL'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for some violence, smoking and brief language)
Running time: 1:32
How to watch: Apple TV+
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