A film can be released at the most unfortunate moment and, as a result, be conveniently forgotten because its content has proven to be too prophetic and, with the passage of time, more disturbing than during its premiere. This happened to The Tailor of Panama, a 2001 spy film directed by John Boorman.
The plot, based on the eponymous 1996 novel by John le Carré, is set in Panama. It begins when Andy Osnard (played by Pierce Brosnan), an agent of MI6, the British secret service, gets assigned there to supervise possible threats to British interests around the Panama Canal. The assignment is supposed to be a punishment, because in the years following the Cold War hardly any such threat is conceivable despite the strategic importance of the location. The person that is supposed to help Osnard in his mission is Harold Pendel (played by Geoffrey Rush), a British expatriate who makes ends meet by working as a top tailor with his customers being members of the Panamanian business and political elite. Pendel is reluctant to work with Osnard and agrees only because of financial problems. Those problems are so severe that Pendel, in order to obtain more money, starts to invent fiction into his reports, including a large secret anti-government group and plans to sell the Canal to the Chinese. Osnard doesn't believe in those claims but, in order to promote his career, doesn't refute them and passes them towards London and Washington where they would be taken seriously and create spectacular consequences.
The Tailor of Panama, partially inspired by Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, was often described as one of the most light-hearted of all le Carré's novels. This was mostly due to the satirical approach towards the world of post-Cold War espionage and the way intelligence agencies served the interests of the Military Industrial Complex. John Boorman, who co-wrote the script with le Carré and Andrew Davies, however, failed to exploit those satirical opportunities in his adaptation. His film, partly made in Ireland and partly on authentic Panamanian locations, is torn between mockery of the Western political establishment and showing the plight of ordinary people in a corrupt Third World country, represented by the character of a disfigured former dissident played by Leonor Varela. Pierce Brosnan, on the other hand, gets wasted in a failed attempt to play some sort of anti-Bond, a secret agent who is guided only by his own selfish interest and greed; despite his best efforts, Brosnan in the film turns too charming to work as a villain. Geoffrey Rush is much better in the role of a pathetic but more believable character whose whole life revolves around illusion and fancy stories. Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of his wife is also wasted. The cinematography by Philippe Rousselot is too dark and this seriously affects the general impression of the film. What ultimately made this interesting is the series of events that started a few months after its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival and showed that what le Carré considered to be satire was actually much closer to reality – the great willingness of policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals to rely on faulty intelligence that told them what they liked to hear and even greater willingness to start military actions with catastrophic consequences based on such intelligence. Because of that, The Tailor of Panama, which was supposed to be a comedy, looks like a very bitter and prophetic drama describing the increasingly chaotic and dangerous world in which we are living today.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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