The Pigeon Tunnel (2023, Errol Morris) (Patreon)

57/100

[NOTE: Italics seem to be broken on Patreon at the moment. At least, I can't see them while composing, and they don't transfer when I copy/paste into another app. If they're in fact missing [EDIT: They are, but only on my desktop], you'll just have to imagine 'em; it's strictly titles in this particular instance.]

Never imagined that Errol Morris, of all people, would make a documentary that frequently had me wondering whether I shouldn't have just read the book that inspired it. (A Brief History of Time, you might think, but my faint memory from over 30 years ago is that Morris helpfully visualizes some concepts that are difficult to wrap your brain around as prose.) As a rule, the more notable Morris' subject, the less compelling his filmed conversation; that's perhaps slightly less true of the late David Cornwell (aka John le Carré), who spoke extemporaneously using roughly the same evocative language that distinguishes his writing. Either that or he's repeating choice phrases from his memoir of the same title, which I haven't read. (On Soviet double agent Kim Philby: "If you'd given him your cat to look after for a couple of weeks, he'd have betrayed the cat somehow.") Psychotherapeutic emphasis on Cornwell's relationship with his ne'er-do-well father, and how that turbulence informed his fiction, touches upon two things that rarely interest me much (cf. The Fabelmans): daddy issues and Portrait of the Artist as an Impressionable Kid. Still, it's a pleasant, sometimes informative chat (even if it occasionally gives the wrong impression, e.g. you'd think, from this film, that The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was Le Carré's first novel), and Morris once again livens things up with noir-inflected re-creations, employing many of the same formal devices seen in Wormwood. (I particularly dug a series of dissolves that slowly propel a distant figure to the top of an enormous spiral staircase, shot from below. Though I feel like that's been done before, "memorably" even though I can't myself remember right now.) Nice use of carefully-placed mirrors to create a stylishly fragmented backdrop in Cornwell's study, too, and while the titular metaphor is very blunt indeed, Morris doesn't push it as hard as I initially feared that he might. All in all, fine, won't feel like wasted time for almost anyone. But from Morris, that remains a disappointment.