The Tailor of Panama

#11 in my ranking of John Boorman’s films.

I think this film almost works. Almost. Not quite, though. There’s a saggy middle section that just drags the whole affair down without building up the tension like it probably should that the rest of the film can’t get past. However, the first third and final third are actually quite adept at pulling together this sort of anti-James Bond through the corrupt underbelly of the outer edges of the intelligence ecosystem, obviously made in no small part to take advantage of Pierce Brosnan’s image as Bond himself right after he finished his contract with EON as the famous secret agent. It also allows Boorman, who seems to have long ago left the drugs of his youth behind him, another venue for edging into the political realm with commentary on the intelligence community, using the novel by John le Carre as his vessel.

Andy Osnard (Brosnan) is an MI6 agent on the outs with the home office, so he gets sent to Panama, considered a backwater, to find what he can in an environment where the British government, in conjunction with the American intelligence agencies, assume there’s little beneath the surface of corruption, even in the face of the handover of the Panama Canal from American to local control. Still, his superior, Luxmore (David Hayman), tells him to dig. Osnard latches onto one of only two hundred British nationals in the nation, the titular tailor Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush) who runs a shop in the tradition of Savile Row from London, operating on a fiction that he’s part of a long tradition of tailors. When Osnard reveals that he knows Pendel’s secret history, that he helped his uncle Benny (Harold Pinter) commit insurance fraud, spent time in jail, and learned his trade in prison, something even Harrys’ wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis) doesn’t even know, Osnard has Harry in the palm of his hand, helped all the more by the fact that Osnard has access to bevies of cash on demand in exchange for Harry’s help.

What gets exploited is the series of interconnecting incentives to lie. Harry is the bottom of the ladder, and his motives are around paying off debts, keeping his secret past from his wife that he considers too good for him, and maybe even feeling like he’s as important as his clientele that reaches all the way up to the president of Panama. Osnard’s incentives are all about bringing MI6 some juicy secrets that no one else knows, making him willing to believe anything, no matter how outlandish, because it’s the exact sort of stuff that someone like Luxmore wants to hear. On top of all of this, which only comes into play later, is the American desire to retake the canal. It’s a domino effect starting from Harry talking about a Silent Opposition to the corrupt Panamanian regime of power which, he says, is headed by his friends and former members of the real opposition under Noriega, Mickie (Brendan Gleeson) and Marta (Leonor Varela). Mickie is a drunk who has grown exhausted from the fighting of his youth, hating the current system but having no stomach for the fight against it anymore. Marta was beaten and marked on her face with unmissable wounds from Noriega’s regime, and all she wants is to work in Harry’s shop and help him personally. Harry’s lies throw these two innocents into the web of deceit that is the intelligence community, bringing unwanted attention not just from British and American spy agencies, but also from some of the Panamanian power centers.

All of this is fascinating and actually quite involving. The problem, I think, is Louisa Pendel. Well, maybe no her character but how she dominates the middle section of the film. This is where Boorman focuses most fully on Harry’s effort to keep the truth of what he’s doing and what he’s done from Louisa, and even though she works alongside one of the president’s advisors as an American diplomat, Harry’s efforts to support his twisting tales of fancy with hard evidence all falls kind of flat. Louisa has suspicions that Harry is having an affair, so to push aside her concerns, he invites Osnard to a weekend trip where there’s some unfulfilled sexual tension between Osnard and Louisa that really goes nowhere. Harry takes spy pictures of some of her papers, and they’re worthless, of course, especially in connection with the idea that Harry has created that China and Taiwan have set aside their differences to come together in a bid to purchase the Canal from Panama. That the papers end up meaning nothing because everyone above Osnard is too excited about the prospects and move forward without any solid evidence at all (even manufactured evidence) deflates what little tension there was in the scene. That, by the way, makes the whole final act, the most purely entertaining part of the film, feel wrong. I have little love for the intelligence communities of the first world, but, especially at this point, they’d need some piece of paper saying that China wanted to buy Panama to get them to move in with troops to retake the Canal.

Still, despite the poor movement of the second act (a focus on Harry having to become forger to create evidence might have been better, especially in regards to further building up the tension of the whole thing instead of letting it flag with the spycraft stuff), the third act is fun as British and American intelligence agencies fumble their way into an invasion while Harry and Osnard deal with the fallout in their own ways. It’s a fun chase through chaos that works pretty well, and it was almost enough to, in my opinion, save the film as a whole. It doesn’t quite do it, though.

The book and film were inspired by the book and adaption of Graham Greene’s and Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana, and I think that ends up working better because of the smaller scale and greater focus on black comedy. At least this filmed adaption is more of a pure effort at thriller while consciously undermining Brosnan’s public perception as another secret agent (he gives the most fun performance in the film and, perhaps, his career). It also explicitly recalls Casablanca a couple of times, casting itself as an anti-Romantic tale of corruption in a remote tropical location, but Boorman had become a Romantic himself at this point in his career, and he can’t quite fight it in that second act, trying to inject pathos into the film where it might have been better to remain more cynical. It kind of feels like Boorman and le Carre’s ways of telling stories were at some kind of odds with each other, even if their worldviews were in some kind of alignment.

Is the film good? Not really. I think a tighter second act could have pushed it up there, but that second act just flags and drains so much tension and excitement out of the film. Is it bad? I wouldn’t go that far. Boorman has definitely made worse, and he’s too in command here for the film to descend into badness. There’s good stuff here, but it just doesn’t really come together.

Rating: 2.5/4