Boorman Does Le Carre in The Tailor of Panama; The Brothers, a Buppie Crowd-Pleaser
You expect a movie to be cinematic?to tell its story, build its characters and articulate its themes mostly through images and cuts. And yet, amazingly, many movies don't really do that. They might as well be plays, or tv sitcoms, or comic books; the storytelling is mostly in the dialogue (or the pop songs played beneath the dialogue), and the whole thing doesn't truly move or flow.
Fans of director John Boorman have grown to appreciate him because, whatever other faults his films possess, they tend to fall squarely in the former camp: the best things in his movies are furiously cinematic?the rhythm of the editing, the nuanced, fiercely focused performances, the penetrating closeups that seem to suggest not just what the characters are thinking, but the world's indifference to their desires. Great Boorman films like Point Blank, Deliverance, Hope and Glory and 1998's The General sweep you along in a river of detailed imagery, suggesting the precision of good fiction and the uncontrollable power of dreams. Even Boorman's inconsistent, misguided or outright bad movies?Zardoz, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Excalibur, the soft-centered Beyond Rangoon?have moments where you get caught up in the rush of images and ideas and can't help admiring Boorman's sheer inventiveness and sense of craft.
All of which explains why The Tailor of Panama is such a disappointment. This political fable about a plot to sell the Panama Canal to a foreign power?adapted by espionage fiction ace John Le Carre from his own novel?is slack and often stagy, and it never gets a handle on why it exists and what it's trying to say. Parts of the film are clearly intended as satire, with deadpan, borderline-arch dialogue no human would ever speak in real life. But good satire requires a certain coldness?a determination to think of the characters as representing certain types of people, or ways of thinking about the world. The abstracting impulse of a good satirist helps sell the story, the characters and the concept; it affirms that we're watching the interplay of ideas. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One (and the movie version) are examples of satire that works. As soon as you try to develop satirical characters into warm-blooded, realistic people, and ask the audience to empathize with them, even root for them, the whole contraption falls apart.
That's what Boorman and Le Carre do: they go for warmth, empathy and realism at the same time that they're slicing and dicing global politics and business practices. The result isn't a disaster on the order of Spike Lee's endless race-and-television satire Bamboozled?a film that confirmed my worst fears about Lee using "powerful" subject matter as a crutch for indulgent filmmaking and sloppy storytelling. But it's still a mess.
The central idea is a pretty good one. The hero is an expatriate British tailor named Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush, overdoing the sad-eyed, hopeful-dreamer thing) who now lives in Panama City and serves as clothier to many great and powerful men. (They adore his suits, even though they don't ever pay their bills on time; as Harry explains, this is a common practice of the rich.) Though Harry claims to have learned his art as an apprentice to a Savile Row master, he's actually an ex-con who came to Panama to reinvent himself. He meets his doppelganger in Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan, smooth and menacing and a bit unfocused). Andy's an MI-6 agent who's like James Bond gone to seed; he was reassigned from London because he ran up huge gambling debts and couldn't keep his hands off the wives and mistresses of the powerful.
Hmm: Panama as purgatory, or a place for second acts. It's simplistic and corny, but as movie ideas go, it's not bad. Unfortunately, Boorman hits the ground strolling rather than running, and keeps strolling, giving you too much time to think about what's not working. Much of the first act is dominated by a long meet-and-greet between Harry and Andy, who's supposedly come to his shop to get fitted for a new suit but really wants to pump Harry for information on the powerful men he clothes. Without giving too much away?and there is a lot of plot in the film, maybe too much?I can say that both Harry and Andy are desperate, so desperate that they're willing to use each other even though they can see through each other. Harry's a prototypical Little Man on the Fringes of History?rather like Tom Hulce's character in the little-seen World War II drama The Inner Circle, about Stalin's projectionist?and he wants to be important, even if it means inventing gossip, sources and tips. Andy gladly accepts the latter even though he knows they're bunk; he's unscrupulous enough to understand that just because something's not true doesn't mean you can't use it to your advantage.
Orbiting around these two potentially fascinating characters is an array of watchable supporting players. The star of The General, Brendan Gleeson, is amusing and nearly unrecognizable as Harry's boozing old buddie, Mickie, a Panamanian ne'er-do-well. Lenor Varela puts some snap in her scenes as Harry's loyal assistant, Marta, who was disfigured by Manuel Noriega's thugs; her performance is all the more noteworthy when you consider how much of the star's water she's asked to carry, repeatedly assuring him that he's a good man, a fine husband, a dreamer, etc. Jamie Lee Curtis is a standout as Harry's wife, Louisa, assistant to the Panamanian director of the canal and the mother of two charming Pendel children. Her no-nonsense charisma makes an impression, even though her part isn't thought out very clearly. She seems much wiser than either Harry or Andy, yet she appears to turn a blind eye toward Harry's painfully inept Walter Mitty shenanigans. And when Andy tries to seduce her, she seems much too willing to consider it, even though she's been established as a person of considerable character who can spot a louse a mile off. (However, the would-be seduction itself is the best scene in the movie. During a riverside picnic, Andy and Louisa get drunk while Harry's out boating with the kids, then swim to a shady spot in the river and neck; Boorman puts his handheld camera at water level, so that it bobs in tandem with the movements of the would-be lovers.)
There are a few intriguing and even powerful moments in the movie, particularly the flashbacks involving Harry, Marta and Mickie, which suggest a wealth of more affecting material that somehow got left on the cutting room floor. But for the most part, Boorman seems content to tell when we expect him to show. At times The Tailor of Panama veers perilously close to Merchant-Ivory territory?not in terms of subject matter, but in its BBC-style tasteful compositions, quirky music and lack of momentum. It's too warm and flaccid to work as a satire, and too full of implausible and overcooked moments to work as a straightforward political drama; there's too much plot for a character study and too much character development for a movie that wants to dazzle us with plot. Is this another instance where a powerful novelist was so determined to protect his work that he drained this movie of its energy, its focus, its movieness? I doubt it; Boorman's too smart, and has been around too long, to let a collaborator make bad decisions on his behalf. Whatever the genealogy of the film's mistakes, The Tailor of Panama is an ungainly piece of work. The material is lovely, but the tailor botched the measurements.
Bill Bellamy is abrasive, complex and unexpectedly touching as Brian "B," a fast-talking lawyer with serious mother resentment issues who deliberately beds and dumps strong, self-confident women who are guaranteed to want revenge. D.L. Hughley is Derrick West, the married friend who can't convince his wife (Tamala Jones) to give him oral sex. That subplot is silly and overplayed, but Derrick's relationship with his elderly mother (Marla Gibbs), whom he wants to move from a nursing home and into his own house, proves unexpectedly involving. As hunky man's man Terry White, Shemar Moore is the weak link in the group?not just because of his likable but shallow acting, but also because in this sort of film, the character who's getting hitched is nearly always the least interesting of the bunch (Steve Guttenberg's sports quizzer in Diner notwithstanding).
The most satisfying performance by far comes from Morris Chestnut, whose star has risen too slowly since his terrific performance in Boyz N the Hood. Chestnut is Jackson "J" Smith, a young doctor who suffers nightmares about a gun-toting bride, but still makes a conscious decision to cease casual sex and open himself up to the next woman he dates. That woman is a wise, funny photographer strikingly played by Gabrielle Union, who's just about the smartest, sexiest leading lady to come down the pike in recent memory.
Chestnut matches her in the charisma department. He's every inch the leading man, but he's no smiling cipher. He's a bit of a brooder, and his prickly relationship with his divorced adult parents, Louise (Jenifer Lewis) and Fred (Clifton Powell), is the reason why.
Louise embraces the pose of a sassy, self-possessed, sexy matriarch who's undaunted by the fact that her marriage ended due to Fred's infidelity; but she hates the fact that Fred seems to have suffered so few emotional consequences from the breakup, and the sight of Fred gallivanting with young women makes her furious.
It would be easy to lampoon Fred, a car dealer with a smooth line of patter and an endless supply of sharp-looking suits. But the filmmaker and Powell turn the man into much more than a no-good sleep-around dog; he's classy and interesting, and you can see how Fred Smith plus Louise Smith yielded such a handsome, successful but emotionally unsteady son. The Brothers is by no means a great film?it's better acted than directed, and better directed than written. But it hits some number of highly original notes.